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Next year, the teacher data reports that sparked a battle between the city and the teachers’ union could find a much warmer reception.

The new firm hired to produce the Teacher Data Initiative is reaching out to the teachers’ unions that bitterly opposed the program, and the firm’s researchers say they are committed to producing tools to help teachers learn, not to rank them.

The Value-Added Research Center at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, the firm hired last month to produce the reports, held a summer workshop on their research methods for officials from school districts around the country. Two researchers from the United Federation of Teachers also attended.

Chris Thorn, associate director of the center, said that this school year’s round of teacher assessment reports will likely look much the same as last year’s.

But the long-term goal for the three-year, $840,000 program, he said, is to refine the way data is collected so it tells the most accurate stories about what’s going on in the classroom.

“You can’t connect students to teachers without data so clean you can eat off of it,” Thorn said. (more…)

The Department of Education created videos to explain the reports. View them here.

The Department of Education is moving to extend a program that judges teachers based on their students’ test scores — and it plans to start paying for the project with taxpayer dollars, at a projected cost of $1.5 million over the next three years. A formal request for vendor proposals released today indicates officials are also mulling an expansion of the program to more teachers.

The program, called the Teacher Data Initiative, launched quietly this school year after causing a politically explosive fight between the DOE and the teachers union the year before. The reports allow principals to track the “value” teachers add to students by looking at student test scores from one year to the next. The teachers union here has gone along with programs to judge entire schools based on test scores, but it drew the line at measuring individual teachers’ performance, arguing that so-called “value-added” models risk unfairly misjudging teachers. (Many academic researchers make this claim as well.)

After news of the effort surfaced, the union fought back by ushering a bill into state law that made it illegal for the city to use test scores when making decisions about job security. Both Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein decried the bill (Bloomberg called it a “special interest protection”), which the legislature passed with no public debate, and the data reports went out as planned. (more…)