City Teacher Data Reports Are Released
12:00 p.m. | Updated After a long legal battle and amid much anguish by teachers and other educators, the city Department of Education released individual performance rankings of 18,000 New York City public school teachers to the public on Friday, after admonishing the news media not to use the scores to label or pillory teachers.
The reports, which name teachers as well as their schools, rank teachers based on their students’ gains on the state’s math and English exams over five years and up until the 2009-2010 school year. The reports place teachers on a curve that leaves 521 of them performing in the bottom fifth percentile on both math and English citywide and 696 consistently in the top fifth among their peers.
Citing both the wide margin of error — on average, a teacher’s math score could be 35 percentage points off, or 53 points on the English exam ––as well as the limited sample size — some teachers are being judged on as few as 10 students — city education officials said their confidence in the data varied widely from case to case.
“The purpose of these reports is not to look at any individual score in isolation ever,” said the city Education Department’s Chief Academic Officer Shael Polakow-Suransky. “No principal would ever make a decision on this score alone and we would never invite anyone, parents, reporters, principals, teachers, to draw a conclusion based on this score alone.”
The data was handed to the news media on CD-ROMs, which contain spreadsheets listing teachers’ scores for the 2007-2008, 2008-2009 and 2009-2010 school years. Roughly 12,000 teachers were given teacher data reports each year.
The teacher rankings began as a pilot program four years ago to improve instruction in 140 city schools. It has turned into the most controversial set of public school statistics to be released by the Bloomberg administration:individual rankings for roughly 18,000 math and English public school teachers from fourth through eighth grades.