40,000 Educators Will Have APPR Scores Recalculated BY NYSED After Errors Are Discovered

From the NY Times:

More than 200 teachers and principals received erroneous scores from New York State on a contentious measurement that ties their performance to how well their students do on tests, according to state documents obtained by The New York Times.

The error, which affected a small percentage of scores for the 2014-15 academic year, could be another blow to the practice of linking educator performance to student exams, a system that has come under fire in recent years.

A letter sent to district superintendents on Friday said that certain test results had been excluded from state-provided growth scores — which track student performance on state exams — for less than 1 percent of the more than 40,000 educators who received such feedback.

These are the erroneous scores they're admitting to - you can be sure there are others.

And of course it's not the fault of the incompetents at NYSED or the incompetent governor:

The state Education Department attributed the error to a contractor, American Institutes for Research, a behavioral and social science research group based in Washington, and said the blunder affected principals and certain teachers whose growth scores included schoolwide measurements of student performance. (Teachers whose scores incorporated only their own students’ tests were not affected.) The letter said the problems occurred “almost exclusively” in grades nine through 12.

The end result is this:

Scores for the more than 40,000 educators would be recalculated at the contractor’s expense; the higher score would be the one that counts.

The system is so complex, so inexplicable, that when a teacher sued over her test score component, NYSED twice refused to show cause for her ineffective rating on the component (here and here.)

NYSED is owning up to the erroneous scores, but you can bet if there were an independent accounting of the evaluations from an entity outside of the state without something riding on the outcome (i.e., some ed reform-linked group or some entity on the state payroll), they'd find more.

And yet, we STILL have this system in place, with teachers having 50% of their ratings linked to so-called student performance as measured by state tests and/or local tests - despite the claims that there is a "moratorium" on using test scores in the evaluations.

The system is rotten to the core, yet it seems as if it will live forever.