Comments on: City releases Teacher Data Reports — and a slew of caveats

By: Upchurch_leslie

Upchurch_leslie — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 06:23:00 +0000

Another thing, might this type of possible embarrassment for a teacher actually make teachers avoid teaching these grades? They could just teach 2nd grade and avoid this! These grades and subjects will become like delivering babies is to ob/gyn physicians. Many doctors have quite the ob part due to law suits.

By: Upchurch_leslie

Upchurch_leslie — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 06:18:00 +0000

This entire thing is a big pile of doo doo. The only saving grace, which I think I read, is that getting some type of government money for the schools was not going to happen if this was not released. So, let’s hope no teachers kill themselves over this statistically inaccurate data!

By: Michael M. (parent still)

Michael M. (parent still) — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 17:02:00 +0000

Thanks.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 14:44:00 +0000

Another layer of error here is that students tend to really produce work for some teachers rather than others based on all sorts of reasons and perceptions, many beyond teachers’ methods and/or ability to change. These tendencies often become part of a school culture, and a teacher may fare far better or worse in different schools depending on this effect, which can have nothing to do with teaching. Examples: personality, background, demeanor, perceived street cred, perceptions of being understanding as opposed to an admin cog, perceptions of being involved or interested in student affairs, sports games, shows, etc., sense of humor, lack of a sense of humor, and on and on. And besides students being shuffled all around, there have been plenty of teacher relocations due to closings and openings of schools, replaced principals (often with incompetent ones), etc. Now add to this perceptions of teachers based on meaningless yet published ranking! This effect affects both rankings and evals!

By: Invictus

Invictus — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 03:01:00 +0000

Let the Unity supporters in the primary and middle schools realize that this is what they get from the UFT after caring not about what happened to teachers in the upper grades. They are the first ones to get the VAM report public “burnings”, next everyone else in a more ridiculous way.

Many attorneys throughout NYC are salivating at this and future debacles. Uncle Klein and the Dear Leader Bloomy are not going to be around to deal with the fall out of new teacher evaluation systems.

Once again, the hubris of the DeFormer agenda pushing the limit until they are walking on air, over a sea filled with hungry sharks/attorneys.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 20:36:00 +0000

Those aren’t margins of error, those are oceanic shipping lanes marked off in a swimming pool.

By: parent

parent — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 18:18:00 +0000

I wonder how much money the City wasted producing these totally worthless teacher ratings. Whoever produced the ratings should be fired, and so should whoever paid for them. A 53% margin of error in english implies that a teacher given a grade of 100 could really have deserved a lower score than a teacher with a grade of 40. Results like that are completely meaningless, and reporting specific point scores with such uncertainty in measurement is a sign of pathetically bad statistical work. One good thing that may come out of this is that it clearly shows that ratings like this are completely bogus and can not be relied on to demonstrate anything at all about individual teacher performance.

By: Elizabeth Green

Elizabeth Green — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 15:51:00 +0000

Michael, as we wrote:
None of this means that we won’t write about what the data dump includes or that we might not publish an adapted database that strips out information linking the city’s data to individual teachers. With more than 90 columns in the Excel sheet the city has developed — and more than 17,000 rows, representing the number of reports issued over their two-year lifespan — the release might well enable us to examine the city’s value-added experiment in new ways.

By: Guest

Guest — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 00:20:00 +0000

Can’t wait until the charter school teachers get their names posted. Scabs.

By: reality-based educator

reality-based educator — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 00:05:00 +0000

Wait – Mulgrew’s not confident that the state’s VAM model will be an improvement over the city’s VAM model used in the TDR’s – you know, the one with the margin of error as high as 75% in math and as high as 87% in ELA – but he STILL agreed to make it THE determining factor in a teacher’s evaluation?

After all, come up “ineffective” on the part of the eval based just on test scores(40%) and you have to be declared “ineffective” overall as a teacher.

Mulgrew better send out Lying Leo Casey to spin that doozy.

By: Michael M. (parent still)

Michael M. (parent still) — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 00:05:00 +0000

GS, please clarify:

Not publishing the data AT ALL, given how we wonky types concur they’re BOGUS, or, just not with names attached?

Different.