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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…)