Teacher performance reports to be expanded; how reliable are they?

In the midst of all the massive budget cuts, DOE intends to contract out with a company to expand the production of the controversial teacher performance reports. Check out Gotham Schools: City will spend $1.5M to extend judging of teachers via test scores.

Lots of people have disputed the utility of these reports -- despite the comments in Gotham Schools from a DOE contractor. As Skoolboy points out here, even if the model is correct, "the Teacher Data Report provides no evidence whatsoever about why a teacher is successful--the many daily practices that promote student learning."

But I'd like to point out another problem. The model used to evaluate teacher effectiveness, as pointed out on our blog here, includes class size at the school and classroom level, meaning that DOE indeed recognizes that teachers should be expected to produce smaller gains the larger their classes. In fact, this is the only external factor included in the model that is assumed to increase teacher effectiveness policies – the rest are teacher and student characteristics.

That's fine and reasonable of course -- far more fair than the school progress reports -- and the teacher bonuses that are based on them, that judge all schools as though they had an equal chance to succeed, despite the fact that some may have classes of under 20 and other at 30 or more.

The problem is that the reported class size data in NYC middle schools and especially at the high school levels is extremely unreliable – so much so that these evaluation reports are likely to be wrong.

Most CTT (inclusion) classes in high school are still misreported as two classes, years after we have pointed out this problem to DOE. In middle school, the reported class size in most cases is actually the homeroom or advisory, not academic classes. Many high school classes, including quite frequently, two different levels of a subject taught by a teacher at the same time to the same group of students are counted as two separate classes. This means that some teachers may be judged as if they had class sizes of 20 or less, when their real class sizes are up to 34 or more.

I’d like to hear how useful these reports are from teachers who have received them – and also if they are sufficiently transparent as to the data they assume, especially when it comes to class size. Otherwise, it would be impossible to check it for accuracy. Please leave a comment.

And the winner is...

Thank you to all who nominated an entry to the contest "Tweed's Greatest Foul-Ups."

This was very difficult to judge because there were so many foul-ups, so many fiascos. It is hard to say which was the absolute worst: the school bus re-routing, the ARIS supercomputer, the credit recovery contribution to raising the graduation rate, the "end of social promotion," the report cards, the pre-K admissions mess, the middle school admissions mess, the gifted and talented admissions mess, the quality reviews, the mindless obsession with test scores, on and on.

All contributed to turning the New York City school system into a new and painful version of 52 Pick-Up. But this game is not funny. It is only funny when Gary Babad writes the press releases, even if they are fake.

Two nominations had to be excluded because while they were powerful, they were not the work of Tweed: one, Norm Scott's suggestion that turning the education system over to a politician was the original disastrous mistake; and two, the suggestion (by anonymous) that hiring a non-educator as chancellor was another disastrous error. The first, as Norm notes, was the decision of the Legislature; the second was the choice of the Mayor.

So, the fastest way to whittle down the list of finalists is to restrict them to those who signed their name to their choice. That makes for a very short list, which is indicative of the fear that people in this city have to openly criticize those in power. This in itself is indicative of the terrible change, the repression of open discussion, that the new regime has introduced into our civic life.

Faced with a very short list of people who were willing or able to sign their names, I award the grand prize to Diana Senechal, who selected the "workshop model" as her biggest blunder. I take it that the blunder was the effort to impose a single method of teaching, in the absence of any genuine curriculum. This blunder was itself indicative of the arrogance of power, the belief that these non-educators could tell every teacher in the system how to teach. From that same arrogance flowed all the other blunders and fiascos, all recognized by teachers and parents, but unacknowledged at 52 Chambers Street as errors.

-- Diane Ravitch