The city's controversial teacher grading system gives Pamela Flanagan the lowest possible grade - a zero - for her performance as an English instructor.
The only problem? Flanagan is a sixth-grade math and science teacher at Tompkins Square Middle School in the East Village. She has never taught English in her five years there.
Flanagan's grade is one of more than 200 errors the teachers union says it found in the city Education Department's rating of 12,000 public school instructors and one of the reasons it's fighting to keep the grades under wraps.
Flanagan, 33, said it was the fear of headlines like "City's Worst Teacher" that made her come forward.
"I believe that parents have a right to know what's going on in the classroom," she said. "But giving parents complete misinformation will not help them."
...
Flanagan's grade was based on the progress 30 students made on the state English exams. She was rated "average" in math - again based on 30 students - but eight of the students listed were never in any of her classes.
"We have broken tests being put into an unreliable formula," United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew said at a news conference Sunday.
At the highly rated Tompkins Square Middle School, 73% of students passed the math exam this year, compared with an average of 51% at middle schools citywide.
"I am in constant contact with parents of my students," said Flanagan. "We have an online grade book, and I write reports on every student eight times a year."
"This report would only harm those relationships," she added, "and call into question the trust that I've worked so hard to build."
Indeed, the report is MEANT to harm relationships between teachers and parents.
The education reform movement has worked for years to undercut the reputations of teachers and smear them as lazy incompetents.
Publishing Teacher Data Reports that reduce the teacher's job to a few numbers based upon test scores is a fantastic way to undercut trust between parent and teacher on an individual level - especially when the TDR's are rife with errors and have a MOE of 25%-30% in any given year anyway.
On an organizational level, the TDR's are meant to undercut teacher protections and give systems cause to fire "bad teachers" - even if the "bad" designation came from jive reports with phonied numbers.
The News lists some other error-filled reports:
Union officials said they received 200 calls from teachers who reported errors, including:
* Deirdre Corcoran, a fifth-grade math teacher at Public School 321 in Brooklyn who was rated "below average" for 2008, even though she was out on maternity leave.
* Christine Caraballo, who was rated an average fifth-grade teacher at PS 132 in Brooklyn, even though she taught in the fourth grade.
I was at a "data meeting" with a few other teachers to look at how "my classes" did on the ELA Acuity exams. We used the vaunted ARIS system to look at our classes. There were, on average, 64 students listed for each of "my classes." I only have 34 on the rosters of my classes. So nearly 50% of the students listed as "my students" on ARIS were NOT MY STUDENTS.
When the AP said look at the trends of how students in your classes were doing on particular multiple choice questions, I balked at calling them "my students." I said when nearly half of the students listed as "mine" were children I had never heard of nor ever taught, these lists on ARIS were not "my classes."
Now the Acuity exams have not been used to rate teachers yet, but you know that the system is in place to do just that when they have to have 40% of teacher evals based upon test scores. The last thing I want to happen is have my name listed in the papers as a "bad teacher" or a "mediocre teacher" because there are 140 students listed as mine who I have never heard of and never taught.
But apparently these kinds of errors don't mean anything to Bloomberg or Obama.
As they've said before, TDR's are the best rating job we can do on teachers so we have to publish them.
To which I say: horsebleep.
Would Obama want his unemployment numbers to be rife with errors and be judged on those numbers?
Would Bloomberg trust a corporation that published quarterly results with 25%-30% margins of error?
The answer is no - so why do they allow these error-filled TDR's to be published and used to smear teachers?
Oh, right - because they want to use them politically to bust the unions and turn teaching into a fast food job.
No comments:
Post a Comment