Teacher Ratings

A while back I posted about the new teacher evaluation system in New York.

I originally wrote about the system here and a little more here.

Well, the results are in and I got my evaluation. What type of teacher am I? According to New York City I'm "Effective," which is basically run of the mill.

Let's look a little deeper. At the end of the day, each teachers receive a numeric score from 0 to 100. The score maps to a grade as follows:

With "Effective" being pretty much the old "Satisfactory."

My overall score was 88.

How did they arrive at that?

Over the course of the school year teachers are evaluated by their supervisors. Using the Danielson Framework for teaching. I consider the Danielson stuff bunk and have yet to be observed by someone who knows my subject area (Computer Science) but I do have a fair supervisor who is supportive of her teachers.

I scored 58 out of 60.

The rest of the rating comes from standardized tests. Let me once again go on record to state that basing teacher ratings on student scores is asinine but it's actually worse. For teachers like myself who don't teach regents courses, our scores come from school composite grades. The city/state have super secret formulas that, incidentally are figured out after the results are in to map my schools regents results onto my evaluation grade. Yep, 40% of my rating is based on students I haven't taught taking exams in subjects I don't teach.

The end result? We were awarded 30 out of 40 points.

The end result 58+30=88.

So, since my kids didn't show growth on history and English regents, I'm a run of the mill teacher.

I think it's time to find another profession.