"The huge confidence intervals are an indication," says DOE's Mittenthal, of "wide margins" of uncertainty. "They say a lot about how confident we are about a particular assessment. They're not an error, not a flaw," but a statistical measure that demonstrates a potentially wide range of values within which an actual score resides.
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The Use of Value-Added Measures of Teacher Effectiveness in Policy and Practice
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DOE spokeswoman Natalie Ravitz argues that the DOE's value-added model accounts for "life factors" because "statisticians make a prediction that factors in race, poverty, English Language Learner [status], disabilities, and absences." Their DOE's value-added model takes multiple factors into account in the calculations, but their algorithms do not seek to define or measure the school effects Corcoran identifies.
"The fundamental problem," NYU's Corcoran told City Limits, is that "the people behind these [value-added] systems have no experience with actual education or instruction." he was quick to point out that he is an economist, himself. "Economists and statisticians devised the value-added method, advised by policy experts with law and business backgrounds. Cognitive development experts have not been part of this process since day one."
'A' is for 'accountability'
DOE administrators currently use value-added data to help teachers understand their strengths and weaknesses in the classroom. Principals can look at student achievement across their school or across and individual grade and identify good and bad practices – again, evidenced by test scores—that can be supported, shared, or reworked.
DOE officials are aware that the data linked to teacher names can be taken out of context, Mittenthal said. Releasing a single score or teacher-rating risks muting the impact of all the other elements that make up teacher evaluations. "If we wanted this out there before we received the [FOIL] request, we'd have released it already."
"This is only one part of a bigger picture for each teacher. If the court compels us to release this information, we're going to include every caveat around it that we can. But the only information that was requested was the value-added data," Mittenthal says. "We're not going to volunteer any other information."
"We want to do our best to make sure that teachers are not shamed or humiliated," he added, recognizing the implicit risk to individuals that releasing the ratings contains, and echoing his boss, the Chancellor.
Teachers claim they are the only public employees whose job performance the city proposes to measure and make public by name. While it's true that police officers, firefighters and other civil service workers do not face a personalized degree of public scrutiny public school principals do face a comparable public airing, as each school earns a letter grade on the City's Progress Reports, linked with the principal's name.
Though subjected to personal scrutiny themselves, principals are divided on the merits of releasing value-added scores.
Principal Ben Shuldiner of the High School for Public Service: Heroes of Tomorrow school in Crown Heights says the public should know how teachers are graded. <
