Failure is not an option

The outlines of New York’s teacher rating system are coming into focus, and the picture is far from encouraging. On Thursday, the state Education Department reported that, based on fourth-grade through eighth-grade reading and math scores, 7% of teachers are rated as highly effective and 77% as effective, while 10% are deemed below par (“developing,” in edu-speak) and 6% are ineffective.

These are numbers to warm the heart of United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew, signaling, as they do, that few of his members will face a remote possibility of firing.

That Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch and Education Commissioner John King are grading on a very generous curve becomes clear when you compare how the teachers fared with how students performed on reading and math tests.

Only 55% of state students scored proficient in English on the most recent exam, and 66% made that level in math. Yet, fully 84% of their teachers were rated as effective or highly effective.

Education officials have an explanation for how so many teachers can be deemed to be doing fine jobs while so many students are lagging.

In simplest terms, it boils down to measuring how much progress students make, deciding what’s average for similar students and rating a teacher as effective if his or her class makes average gains.

Here’s how that would work if applied to students: Everyone in the class gets an F, so that’s the average, so everyone passes.

One point of rating teachers is to identify and let go the weakest performers. But the larger point of rating teachers is to hold them to higher standards at the same time as the schools will be demanding more from students.

But none of that means a fig in the rating system because a teacher who gets average progress, no matter how limited, is defined as effective. Still more distressing, New York is about to introduce a tougher curriculum. It will go to waste if, on average, teachers produce poor performance and are told they are doing just fine.