A Dark Day in New York State
Dear Deborah,
May 16, 2011, was a dark day in the history of New York state. On that date, the New York State Board of Regents, once known for careful deliberation and the integrity of its standards, approved a plan to evaluate teachers by their students' test scores. Students' scores will count for as much as 40 percent of teachers' evaluations. This plan has neither research nor evidence to support it. The Regents are making a gamble with the future of educational quality and with the lives of the state's teachers.
To be fair, they did it for the money. New York won a Race to the Top award, so officials obliged themselves to judge teachers by test scores, but their proposal said that the scores would count for only 20 percent when judging a teacher's worth. Now the Regents, allegedly in response to a request by Gov. Andrew Cuomo, raised the percentage to up to 40 percent, to be composed of state and local tests, or state tests only. I say "allegedly" because Gov. Cuomo has heretofore not been known for his interest in technical issues related to teacher evaluation.
Like other states, New York now will operate on the assumption that student scores are a valid measure of teacher quality. They are not. The Regents chose to ignore a letter from 10 of the nation's leading assessment experts, urging them not to go down this path. The testing experts summarized research showing that the