Hurdles Emerge in Rising Effort to Rate Teachers

[groovedaddy]

For the past three years, Katie Ward and Melanie McIver have worked as a team at Public School 321 in Park Slope, Brooklyn, teaching a fourth-grade class. But on the reports that rank the city's teachers based on their students’ standardized test scores, Ms. Ward’s name is nowhere to be found.

“I feel as though I don’t exist,” she said last Monday, looking up from playing a vocabulary game with her students.

Down the hall, Deirdre Corcoran, a fifth-grade teacher, received a ranking for a year when she was out on child-care leave. In three other classrooms at this highly ranked school, fourth-grade teachers were ranked among the worst in the city at teaching math, even though their students’ average score on the state math exam was close to four, the highest score.

“If I thought they gave accurate information, I would take them more seriously,” the principal of P.S. 321, Elizabeth Phillips, said about the rankings. “But some of my best teachers have the absolute worst scores,” she said, adding that she had based her assessment of those teachers on “classroom observations, talking to the children and the number of parents begging me to put their kids in their classes.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/27/nyregion/27teachers.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=a2

[proud2BlibKansan]

1. Let's also not forget those who teach untested grades and subjects

The lunacy of this rating system is unreal.