Want to be rated ‘highly effective’ in New York? Don’t teach English or math in grades 4-8
English and math teachers in grades 4-8 in New York are much less effective in promoting student growth on state assessments (or comparable measures) than other teachers in the Empire State.
Does that sound plausible? That teachers of particular subjects in particular grades are just not as good at promoting student learning?
Perhaps not. But it’s the inevitable conclusion to be drawn from the scores awarded to New York teachers as part of the 2012-13 Annual Professional Performance Review (APPR). New York’s state education law, passed in 2010 and amended in 2012, provides for teachers to be classified as “highly effective,” “effective,” “developing” or “ineffective” based on their score on a 100-point scale. Twenty points are based on student growth on state assessments (or comparable measures); an additional 20 points on locally selected measures approved by the New York State Education Department; and 60 points on multiple measures of teacher effectiveness, most commonly classroom observation ratings.
Nearly a year after New York’s 700 or so school districts provided the 2012-13 APPR ratings to their teachers in September 2013, the State Education Department released summary information about the ratings required by the law. (New York City was not included because its plan was approved for the start of the 2013-14 school year.) For the more than 100,000 teachers whose ratings were released—ratings that might compromise a teacher’s privacy were excluded from the data—the results were overwhelmingly positive. Nearly 55 percent of teachers statewide were classified as “highly effective,” and an additional 41 percent were classified as “effective.” Fewer than four percent were rated “developing,” and not even one in a hundred teachers was classified as “ineffective.”
Because the ratings are based on 700 different APPR plans, however, these distributions differed substantially from one district to the next. In Rochester and Syracuse, for example, only two percent of teachers were rated “highly effective,” and 39 percent were classified as “developing” or “ineffective.” Little wonder that there is litigation regarding these ratings, which by state law may lead to an expedited teacher dismissal process. (I’m a consultant on two such lawsuits.)
But there is another source of inequality in ratings that hits teachers within the same district, and even within the same school. By law, teachers of English and math in grades 4-8 receive the first 20 points of their overall evaluation based on their “Mean Growth Percentile,” a complex calculation of how their students performed on the statewide annual assessments in English and/or math compared to the performance of similar students across the state. This calculation, commonly referred to as a value-added measure of teacher performance, results in a bell-shaped curve that ranks teachers in relation to one another. The teachers whose students score much higher, on average, than similar students will be rated “highly effective” on this component; conversely, the teachers whose students score much worse, on average, than similar students will be rated “developing” or “ineffective.” By design, the vast majority of teachers will be classified as “effective.”
The figure below shows the distribution of the ratings for the “state assessments or comparable measures” component for the roughly 40,000 teachers who received Mean Growth Percentile scores A Sociological Eye on Education | Want to be rated ‘highly effective’ in New York? Don’t teach English or math in grades 4-8: