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Data reports can’t be used to evaluate teachers
Oct 9, 2008 12:05 PM
Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and UFT President Randi Weingarten reached an agreement on Oct. 1 that closes the door on using student test score data to evaluate teacher performance and keeps the reports confidential.
The agreement came on the eve of the Department of Education’s planned announcement that it was producing teacher data reports that tried to isolate the contribution of math and ELA teachers in grades 4 to 8 to their students’ performance on state math and reading tests.
The teacher data reports, which will be issued in November, will be based on last year’s New York State math and ELA exams and, if applicable, test score data from the two prior testing years. The reports are available only to the principal and the individual teacher, unless that teacher decides to share it.
“We wish to be clear on one point: the Teacher Data Reports are not to be used for evaluation purposes,” said Klein and Weingarten in a joint letter published in the Principal’s Weekly that spelled out the agreement. “That is, they won’t be used in tenure determinations or the annual rating process. Administrators will be specifically directed accordingly. These reports, instead, are designed to help you pinpoint your own strengths and weaknesses, and empower you, working with your principal and colleagues, to devise strategies to improve.”
When the DOE conducted a pilot program last year, the union acted quickly to prevent the use of such data in making tenure decisions. While the DOE assured the union it would not use the data for evaluations, the union received further support when the state Legislature agreed in the spring that tenure cannot be based on standardized test scores.
Weingarten said that while the reports will help teachers identify their own strengths and weaknesses, there needs to be a broad array of criteria used in properly evaluating teachers.
Letter describes agreement
The DOE/UFT agreement, which is spelled out in a joint letter, says that the reports are designed to help teachers understand how their efforts are influencing student progress by giving teachers access to such useful information as:
- whether the data suggest that the teacher had a greater influence on the learning of some groups of students than on others;
- how the teacher is doing with students in the bottom of the class or the top of the class; and
- what other English and math teachers in similar circumstances are doing successfully that the teacher could learn from; what the teacher’s biggest successes are that the teacher could share with colleagues.
The reports attempt to isolate individual teachers’ effects on student learning by controlling for more than 35 different factors outside a teacher’s control, including class size, students’ prior test scores, and the percentage of students with disabilities and living in poverty in each class. The letter acknowledges “that even with these statistical controls, reports like these can never perfectly represent an individual teacher’s contribution to student learning.”
The letter to principals further notes that the teacher data reports can be best understood in the context of the values of empowerment and collaboration that are central to the collective work of the DOE and the UFT over the past two years.
“Empowerment is premised on the view that we need to give educators — the people closest to students with the best knowledge of what it will take to succeed — the decision-making power and tools necessary to determine how to help students succeed,” the letter said.
Go here to read the joint Klein/Weingarten letter in the Oct. 1 Principal’s Weekly on the Teacher Data Initiative.
