Critiquing How Cuomo Rates Teachers
To the Editor:
Re “Clash Over Cuomo’s Plan for Grading Teachers” (front page, March 23), about the dispute over Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s proposal to use state testing for 50 percent of public school teachers’ evaluation:
The “growth model” used to evaluate teachers is based on an arcane formula that tries to measure student academic growth under a particular teacher’s tutelage. The formula is so flawed that if every one of a teacher’s students failed the state assessments, that teacher could still have a “highly effective” growth score. Conversely, a teacher could have every student achieve a perfect score and still be considered “ineffective.”
A 2011 On Education column by Michael Winerip, “Evaluating New York Teachers, Perhaps the Numbers Do Lie,” focused on a New York City teacher, Stacey Isaacson, who was among the lowest-ranked teachers in the city because of poor growth scores on state assessments, though her students scored extremely well. She taught all honors classes, where students’ scores were already near-perfect, with little room for growth. She was lauded as an outstanding and dedicated teacher. Still, she was expected to be denied tenure.
Dismissing good teachers is not going to make public education better. The overemphasis on a statistical model that doesn’t work, based on poorly conceived assessments, may, in a special bit of irony, enable some truly incompetent educators to keep their jobs. Additionally, charter schools, with which the governor is closely allied, should not be exempt from teacher evaluation system requirements imposed on public schools.
Outside of the governor’s office and the State Education Department, this is not anyone’s idea of an effective evaluation process for teachers.
ROD DRISCOLL
Peru, N.Y.
The writer, a teacher, is a former school board president and president of a local teachers union.
To the Editor:
An important point needs to be stressed: The tests administered to the students last year were “atrocious,” Bob Bender, the principal for P.S. 11 in Manhattan, wrote in a letter to parents.
The new tests “were confusing, developmentally inappropriate and not well aligned with the Common Core standards,” Elizabeth Phillips, the principal of the high-performing P.S. 321 in Brooklyn, wrote in an April 10 Op-Edessay in your paper.
How can Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo evaluate teachers based on flawed, atrocious tests? This should be the first order of business to discuss!
DEBBIE DEANE
Brooklyn
To the Editor:
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has repeated his absurd contention that “99 percent of the teachers were rated effective while only 38 percent of high school graduates are ready for college or careers” so many times that one could believe that the entire education reform agenda in New York was designed just to provide him with this one sound bite.
Everyone in the state, including the governor, knows perfectly well that new tests given in grades three through eight are far more difficult than the ones they replaced. A steep decline in English and math test scores was Critiquing How Cuomo Rates Teachers - NYTimes.com:
