The Value and Evaluation of Educators

In the wake of the recent release of personal performance data of 18,000 teachers in New York, last night I watched the 2011 film Detachment starring Adrien Brody. Uncanny timing. Detachment tells the story of Henry (Brody), a substitute teacher who suffers every unbearable weight of life, admits failure, yet defies nihilism and tries only to do good by the seemingly hopeless inner-city kids he teaches. The film offers a harrowing look at the education system during No Child Left Behind, and after the suicide of a student, calls to question the roles and obligations of educators to their students.

The New York City Education Department's release of personal performance data not only fundamentally restricts the potential of educators by neglecting to measure many of their important, non-standardized contributions, but its data is ill-gotten on many different levels. Individual teachers' scores reflect the performance of their students in math and english over the five years leading up to the 2009-2010 school year. The quality of the evaluation itself is questioned in The Atlantic, which points to the study's admitted 53 point margin of error in its findings.


Additionally, Joe Hines acknowledges the political disparity of such a release:

Obviously how school's are performing is going to be political, but this seems like Bloomberg's attempt to play politics with the lives of individual teachers. Transparency is important, and maybe releasing the data on schools or school districts themselves would be in the public's interest.

The optics of this decision are terrible, though. New York's billionaire mayor shaming public school teachers to advance his political agenda.

The Times itself looks as if they're going to be publishing the rankings. Is this the proper role for the paper of note? Does publishing the rankings give Bloomberg exactly what he wants?

It will be interesting to see the inevitable ramifications of this outdated analysis shrouded in statistical error, ambiguous methods, political bias, and shame.