Jersey Jazzman: New York's Absurd Debate About Teacher Evaluations & Test Scores

Jersey Jazzman: New York's Absurd Debate About Teacher Evaluations & Test Scores:

New York's Absurd Debate About Teacher Evaluations & Test Scores

 From this side of the Hudson, the controversy in New York this week over test scores and teacher evaluations makes New Jersey's education policy debates look relatively sane.


And that's no small trick.

Of course, there was already plenty to hate about New York's teacher evaluation system, APPR (Annual Professional Performance Review) before Angry Andy Cuomo got his way and imposed changes that make a bad system even worse.

APPR, like New Jersey's AchieveNJ, is predicted on the idea that the educator -- and only the educator -- is responsible for the "growth" of his or her students. It ignores the impacts of funding inequities or district-level curriculum decisions or inadequate facilities or non-random assignment of students or any of the many factors that impact student learning that are completely out of the control of teachers and/or principals.

In New Jersey, the test-based components of AchieveNJ also ignore student characteristics, even though SGPs -- Student Growth Percentiles, the test-based measures of student achievement used in teacher evaluations -- are clearly biased against teachers who work in high-poverty, low-resourced schools.

New York's growth model at least attempts to account for differences in student characteristics. According to the state's Technical Report, the bias against teachers and schools serving high-needs students has been significantly reduced compared to earlier versions of the model.

But that doesn't make New York's growth measures any less statistically noisy or invalid. According to the Technical Report, one-third of New York's teachers changed ratings from Jersey Jazzman: New York's Absurd Debate About Teacher Evaluations & Test Scores: