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Wednesday, February 15, 2012

NYC Public School Parents: Why the release of the Teacher data reports and adoption of a new statewide evaluation system will be bad for teachers and bad for kids

NYC Public School Parents: Why the release of the Teacher data reports and adoption of a new statewide evaluation system will be bad for teachers and bad for kids:

Why the release of the Teacher data reports and adoption of a new statewide evaluation system will be bad for teachers and bad for kids

The UFT has lost its lawsuit and the DOE says it will release the teacher data reports to the media within weeks, with all the major newspapers expected to print them. These reports, which rate 12,700 teachers by means of numerical ratings of 1 to 100, are based solely on the 2010 value-added test scores of their students, filtered through a complicated formula. They are widely seen by many experts as highly unreliable, based onfalse or incomplete data and with huge margins of error -- even if you believe that standardized test scores alone are all that matter.

The city will release this data despite the fact that Chris Cerf, then Deputy Chancellor and now Acting NJ Commissioner of Education, had promised the UFT in 2008 that the Department would do everything in its power