NYC Educator: Ineffective City Teachers?

NYC Educator: Ineffective City Teachers?:

Ineffective City Teachers?

Capital NY has a piece about the relatively large percentage of city teachers rated ineffective. On first glance, one might conclude that teachers in upstate cities aren't as good as teachers elsewhere in the state. Doubtless talking heads and op-ed columnists around the state will gleefully come to that conclusion, and much of the nation has been led to believe there's a zombie-like plague of bad teachers that must be eradicated at any cost.

And yet there's an important factor these folks will fail to consider--New York's junk science law allowed locals to negotiate agreements in how teachers were rated, and every single local has a different system with different criteria. I'm not an expert, but people in the know have told me the upstate city systems are among the very worst. I've no doubt that teachers rated "ineffective" will agree with that. More likely than inferior teaching quality is their union leaders are ineffective negotiators. There's certainly a lot of that going around.

While I have reason to believe the NYC system will not result in as many ineffective ratings, I know our system is cumbersome, unwieldy, and largely incomprehensible. We have complicated formulas with 15% of this and 40% of that, and there's simply no way such estimations can accurately rate what it is we actually do. Anyone who really believes it does knows nothing about our jobs.

Almost the entire rationale for this system was that teachers must be judged by test scores. The fact that teachers account for somewhere between 1 and 14% of test score variation is neither here nor there. That's why Diane Ravitch routinely refers to "value-added" ratings as junk science. So what we have here, basically, is a comparison of rotten apples and rotten oranges.NYC Educator: Ineffective City Teachers?: