Public release of teacher rankings sparks debate
The Obama administration’s push to make student test scores a bigger part of teacher evaluations may be having an unintended side effect: It’s cooling officials’ appetite for making the data public.
Teachers unions have always opposed publishing the class results of individual public school teachers, saying the scores students produce each spring in math and reading, for instance, don’t tell the whole story. Now even education reformers are having second thoughts about releasing the data.
Thousands of teachers in the USA’s two largest school districts are now part of searchable online databases that detail their “value-added” scores, ranking them relative to one another based on gains their students show in a given school year: In New York City, the education department in February released individual rankings of 18,000 teachers. In August 2010, the Los Angeles Times produced a database of ratings that has grown to include 11,500 Los Angeles elementary school teachers.
Elena Silva of the Washington, D.C., think tank Education Sector said many reformers believed publicizing teacher rankings would change everything.
“The world would know, and we would be able to dismiss ineffective teachers and reward effective teachers, and everyone would be happier — and the system would be better,” Silva said. “And that’s a wonderful vision, but in fact, we aren’t as far along as most would have hoped with teacher evaluations.”
In the absence of reliable evaluations that fully capture how teachers affect students, publicly rating teachers “is a faulty approach,” she said. “I do think people are backpedaling on that, and I do think they are rightly backpedaling.”
Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach For America and a self-proclaimed “strong supporter of teacher accountability and effectiveness,” wrote in March in The Wall Street Journal that she was “baffled and embarrassed” by New York City’s decision to release the data.
The Obama administration has long sought to make value-added scores part of teacher evaluations. It required, for instance, that states seeking federal stimulus aid get rid of legal barriers that would prohibit tying the scores to teacher pay and retention. As the tests’ importance has risen, so has skepticism about their usefulness and accuracy, both from researchers and teachers.
Even Education Secretary Arne Duncan has changed his thinking about making the test scores public. In 2010, after the Times published its analysis, Duncan said parents have a right to information indicating whether their children’s teachers are effective. “What’s there to hide?” he asked. By 2012, Duncan was more circumspect. Speaking to Education Week, a trade publication, he credited the Times with shining a light on the data, but he added, “Do you need to publish every single teacher’s rating in the paper? I don’t think you do.”