Teacher Report Cards: Should Teachers Be Graded on a Curve?

There may be a day of reckoning coming for teachers across the U.S. Teacher's unions are doing whatever they can to stop this overwhelming demand for teacher accountability from parents, students, and lawmakers. In New York state, teacher's unions are appealing the recent ruling by Manhattan's supreme court Justice Cynthia Kern that allows the release of teacher report cards for some New York City teachers.

According to a 2009 report conducted by the New Teacher Project, 99 percent of all teachers in America are ranked at "satisfactory" or above. Thomas Kane of Harvard University conducted his own study with researchers Douglas Staiger and Robert Gordon. Their study determined that if school systems would cut the bottom 25 percent of their existing teaching staff, test scores for students in those schools would rise 14 percentile points before they graduated.

Value-Added Data is the Problem

Teachers are being evaluated based on the "value-added data" statistical model. The teachers and their unions contend this type of analysis is unfairly portraying teachers in a bad light based on estimations of performance and results rather than more precisely measured data. Newspapers and other media outlets want to release the data regarding the performance and evaluation of 12,000 New York teachers.

Opponents of the value-added system say that the evaluations really don't tell the whole story. However, the value-added analysis takes previous test scores into consideration while omitting or controlling other factors outside the control of a teacher like attendance, overall class size, and the poverty level of the surrounding area. This system grades teachers on how much they have raised their student's test scores above the predicted average scores. Then teachers are ranked on a curve according to their overall effectiveness.

New York City Defends Teacher Report Cards

In just a few years, the value-added statistical model has reliably shown which teachers are the very best and which are the very worst. Opponents contend that average teachers end up being rated as lower than they actually are. Teachers and their unions say this is unfair to the best average teachers in the middle.

Still, this value-added statistical model of teacher evaluation is better than the current method of evaluation in which 99 percent of teachers are making the grade, so to speak. It is likely that a small number of teachers be unfairly evaluated. However, these teacher report cards will also get rid of the worst teachers and provide incentive for teachers to become better at what they do. After all, the primary goal of education is to provide the best teachers for students.

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