| At the end of last week the New York City school district released individual teacher and school test score data. The data was misleading, the data was old, and in some cases, teachers were graded for subjects they didn’t teach. This is a story with “legs” and if you have any interest in the so-called accountability movement, keep reading.
Testing Run Amok: The Fallout… Even Bill Gates Doesn’t Like What’s going On in NY: Shame Is Not the Solution
“Last week, the New York State Court of Appeals ruled that teachers’ individual performance assessments could be made public. I have no opinion on the ruling as a matter of law, but as a harbinger of education policy in the United States, it is a big mistake…”
Read more of Bill Gates’ Op-Ed in the New York Times. And from the New York Times, Day 1: “Teacher Quality Widely Diffused, Ratings Indicate”
“The controversial ratings of roughly 18,000 New York City teachers released on Friday showed that teachers who were most and least successful in improving their students’ test scores could be found all around – in the poorest corners of the Bronx, like Tremont and Soundview, and in middle-class neighborhoods of Queens, like Bayside and Forest Hills…”
Read more of the February 24 New York Times article. New York Times, Day 2: “In Teacher Ratings, Good Test Scores Are Sometimes Not Good Enough”
“At Public School 234 in TriBeCa, where children routinely alight for school from luxury cars, roughly one-third of the teachers’ ratings were above average, one-third average and one-third below average…”
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