12,000 Teacher Reports, but What to Do With Them?

Jennifer Medina:

As the city's students return to school on Wednesday, thousands will enter classrooms led by a teacher that the Department of Education has deemed low performing on internal reports. But in a sign of how complicated and controversial the reports are, many teachers never received them, and there are no plans to release them to parents.

The reports use standardized test scores to monitor how much teachers have helped students improve from one year to the next and whether they are successful with particular groups of children, such as boys or those who have struggled for years.

During the last school year, education officials distributed some 12,000 reports that considered how well teachers did in educating students, producing a report for any teacher who taught fourth through eighth grade for the last two years. The reports put New York at the center of a national debate over ways to measure the effectiveness of individual teachers and the role that test scores should play in the evaluations.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at September 9, 2009 1:41 AM
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