March 6, 2011
Evaluating New York Teachers, Perhaps the Numbers Do Lie
By MICHAEL WINERIP, NY TIMES
LINK

No one at the Lab Middle School for Collaborative Studies works harder than Stacey Isaacson, a seventh-grade English and social studies teacher. She is out the door of her Queens home by 6:15 a.m., takes the E train into Manhattan and is standing out front when the school doors are unlocked, at 7. Nights, she leaves her classroom at 5:30.

“She’s very dedicated,” said Tejal Bahtt, a fellow teacher. “She works way harder than I work. Yesterday I punched in at 7:10 and her time card was already there.”

Last year, when Ms. Isaacson was on maternity leave, she came in one full day a week for the entire school year for no pay and taught a peer leadership class.

Her principal, Megan Adams, has given her terrific reviews during the two and a half years Ms. Isaacson has been a teacher. “I know that this year had its moments of challenge — you always handled it with grace and presence,” the principal wrote on May 4, 2009. “You are a wonderful teacher.”

On the first day of this school year, the principal wrote, “I look forward to being in your classroom and seeing all the great work you do with your students,” and signed it with a smiley face.

The Lab School has selective admissions, and Ms. Isaacson’s students have excelled. Her first year teaching, 65 of 66 scored proficient on the state language arts test, meaning they got 3’s or 4’s; only one scored below grade level with a 2. More than two dozen students from her first two years teaching have gone on to Stuyvesant High School or Bronx High School of Science, the city’s most competitive high schools.

“Definitely one of a kind,” said Isabelle St. Clair, now a sophomore at Bard, another selective high school. “I’ve had lots of good teachers, but she stood out — I learned so much from her.”

You would think the Department of Education would want to replicate Ms. Isaacson — who has degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia — and sprinkle Ms. Isaacsons all over town. Instead, the department’s accountability experts have developed a complex formula to calculate how much academic progress a teacher’s students make in a year — the teacher’s value-added score — and that formula indicates that Ms. Isaacson is one of the city’s worst teachers.

According to the formula, Ms. Isaacson ranks in the 7th percentile among her teaching peers — meaning 93 per cent are better.

This may seem disconnected from reality, but it has real ramifications. Because of her 7th percentile, Ms. Isaacson was told in February that it was virtually certain that she would not be getting tenure this year. “My principal said that given the opportunity, she would advocate for me,” Ms. Isaacson said. “But she said don’t get your hopes up, with a 7th percentile, there wasn’t much she could do.”

That’s not the only problem Ms. Isaacson’s 7th percentile has caused. If the mayor and governor have their way, and layoffs are no longer based on seniority but instead are based on the city’s formulas that scientifically identify good teachers, Ms. Isaacson is pretty sure she’d be cooked.

She may leave anyway. She is 33 and had a successful career in advertising and finance before taking the teaching job, at half the pay.

“I love teaching,” she said. “I love my principal, I feel so lucky to work for her. But the people at the Department of Education — you feel demoralized.”

How could this happen to Ms. Isaacson? It took a lot of hard work by the accountability experts.

Everyone who teaches math or English has received a teacher data report. On the surface the report seems straightforward. Ms. Isaacson’s students had a prior proficiency score of 3.57. Her students were predicted to get a 3.69 — based on the scores of comparable students around the city. Her students actually scored 3.63. So Ms. Isaacson’s value added is 3.63-3.69.

What you would think this means is that Ms. Isaacson’s students averaged 3.57 on the test the year before; they were predicted to average 3.69 this year; they actually averaged 3.63, giving her a value added of 0.06 below zero.

Wrong.

These are not averages. For example, the department defines Ms. Isaacson’s 3.57 prior proficiency as “the average prior year proficiency rating of the students who contribute to a teacher’s value added score.”

Right.

The calculation for Ms. Isaacson’s 3.69 predicted score is even more daunting. It is based on 32 variables — including whether a student was “retained in grade before pretest year” and whether a student is “new to city in pretest or post-test year.”

Those 32 variables are plugged into a statistical model that looks like one of those equations that in “Good Will Hunting” only Matt Damon was capable of solving.

The process appears transparent, but it is clear as mud, even for smart lay people like teachers, principals and — I hesitate to say this — journalists.

Ms. Isaacson may have two Ivy League degrees, but she is lost. “I find this impossible to understand,” she said.

In plain English, Ms. Isaacson’s best guess about what the department is trying to tell her is: Even though 65 of her 66 students scored proficient on the state test, more of her 3s should have been 4s.

But that is only a guess.

Moreover, as the city indicates on the data reports, there is a large margin of error. So Ms. Isaacson’s 7th percentile could actually be as low as zero or as high as the 52nd percentile — a score that could have earned her tenure.

Teachers are eligible for tenure in their third year. To qualify, a teacher must be rated “effective” in three categories: instructional practices, including observations by the principal; contribution to the school community; and student achievement, including the teacher data report. Ms. Isaacson was rated effective on the first two.

The past chancellor, Joel I. Klein, imposed new policies to make tenure harder to earn.

In an e-mail, Matthew Mittenthal, a department spokesman said: “We are saying that a teacher’s tenure decision should simply be delayed (not denied) until that teacher has demonstrated effective practice for consecutive years in all three categories. The alternative is what we’ve had in the past — 90-plus percent of teachers who are up for tenure receive it. Do you think journalists deserve lifetime jobs after their third year in the business?”

The view seems to be gaining support.

However, the number of years that it should take to earn tenure does not get to the heart of the problem.

The tougher question, says Ms. Isaacson, is how to create a system that will fairly evaluate teachers, whether it is used to grant tenure or lay off teachers. “I don’t have a problem looking at teachers based on merit,” she said. “Every job I had, I was evaluated based on merit.”

Marya Friedman, a sophomore at Bronx Science, describes Ms. Isaacson as brimming over with merit. “I really liked how she’d incorporate what we were doing in history with what we did in English,” Marya said. “It was much easier to learn” — which, of course, is what great teachers strive for.

E-mail: oneducation@nytimes.com

The Truth About Teachers

I love this posting by NYC Educator:

There is no question in my mind that the path we're embarking upon is littered with, reeking of, completely composed of sheer nonsense. We're moving into an evaluation system that relies on "value-added" information, information that can make an exemplary teacher look like an utter incompetent. And we're also playing right into the hands of "reformers," yet again.

As it happens, I've been called upon to raise test scores, to clean up after others have not done so. I've been able to do it. Does that make me a good teacher? I don't think so. It makes me a determined taskmaster. If you tell me these kids won't graduate unless they pass a test, they will golly goshdarn do so, and no, I didn't cheat to make it happen. I simply drilled them to death in a joyless spiral, never ending until they reached their goal, whether they wanted to or not. I've done things I'm proud of, but that's not one of them.

A problem is you can't always raise test scores. What if the kids have 95 averages? Can you get them to 97? Does it even matter? At some point, students are excellent. There's nothing more frustrating to me than meeting a parent who chides a kid for getting a 98, when only a hundred will do. Your kid is wonderful, I say. If she were my daughter, I'd wear sandwich signs, beat a bass drum, and shout to everyone up and down Main Street that she was mine.

Still, what if she were in my class and I failed to get her to 99? What if she went down to 97, or worse, 96? Would that give me a negative value-added, like the poor woman in the linked article, the one denied tenure based on nonsense? The one who'd be in line to be fired under the scenarios laid out by Mayor Bloomberg and the acolytes he's purchased at E4E?

There is a national insanity, rooted in the idiotic and witless assumption that every child in the United States will be not only constantly improving, but also passing absolutely everything by 2014, otherwise known as No Child Left Behind. Our current President, Barack Obama, has assumed the education mantle of George W. Bush and is continuing this fanatical, nonsensical policy to the benefit of no one but demagogues who wish to undo public education. Joel Klein is taking millions to figure how to replace teachers with computer programs.

A teacher can turn a kid's life around. A teacher can negotiate the tough paths teenagers face, show them options, talents, passions. A teacher can inspire a child to be virtually anything, anyone. A teacher can open a child's eyes, sometimes literally, but more often to possibilities the child would never imagine alone. A teacher can give kids what they don't get at home, for whatever reason. A teacher can show kids that life is full of joy, that there is humor in everything, that people are full of love and hope and things they'd never imagine without a helping hand. A teacher can unlock mysteries, open doors kids never knew existed.

But in 2011, in these United States of America, the only value a teacher has is to improve test scores. Fail that task, and nothing else matters.

You're fired. Good luck at whatever job you can muster with that on your resume.