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Summary Obama admin's push to make student scores a part of teacher evaluations has side effects.
Teachers unions have always opposed publishing individual public school teachers class results in newspapers or online, saying the scores students produce each spring in math and reading, for instance, dont tell the whole story.Now even education reformers — and reform-minded public officials — are having second thoughts about releasing the data.Thousands of teachers in the USAs two largest school districts are now part of searchable online databases that detail their value-added scores, ranking them relative to one another based on skills gains their students show in a given school year: In New York City, the education department in February released individual rankings of 18,000 teachers.In August 2010, the Los Angeles Times produced a database of ratings that has grown to include 11,500 Los Angeleselementary school teachers. Its planning later this year to publish middle-school teachers scores as well.Elena Silva of the Washington, D.C., think tank Education Sector said many reformers believed publicizing teacher rankings would change everything. The world would know and we would be able to dismiss ineffective teachers and reward effective teachers and everyone would be happier — and the system would be better, she said. And thats a wonderful vision, but in fact we arent as far along as most would have hoped with teacher evaluations.In the absence of reliable evaluations that fully capture how teachers affect students, publicly rating teachers is a faulty approach, she said. I do think people are backpedaling on that and I do think they are rightly backpedaling.Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach For America and a self-proclaimed strong supporter of teacher accountability and effectiveness, wrote in March in The Wall Street Journal that she was baffled and embarrassed by New York Citys decision to release the data.The mother of students in city schools, Kopp said that when she dropped her kids off at school that week, I had a hard time looking their teachers in the eye.The Obama administration has long sought to make value-added scores part of individual teachers evaluations. It required, for instance, that states seeking federal stimulus aid get rid of legal barriers that would prohibit tying the scores to teacher pay and retention. As the tests importance has risen, so has skepticism about their usefulness and accuracy, both from researchers and teachers.Even U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has changed his thinking about making the scores public. In 2010, after the Times published its analysis, Duncan said parents have a right to information indicating if their childrens teachers are effective: Whats there to hide? he said. By 2012, Duncan was more circumspect.Speaking to Education Week, a trade publication, he credited the Times with shining a light on the data, but asked, Do you need to publish every single teachers rating in the paper? I dont think you do.New findings from Education Sector show that about six in 10 teachers say the feedback they get from evaluations is meaningful. But since 2007, the percentage who approve of measuring their effectiveness by student test scores has grown only slightly, from 49% to 54%.There is increasing awareness that teachers are not going to be supportive about this, Silva said. Teachers, she said, are not opposed to being measured. They just are very concerned about these specific measures — and theres good reason for that.
