Teacher Ranking: A Pessimistic Note

From the NY Times.  You can always find examples of misclassification when you apply a discrimination function:  A mispriced insurance risk, an unfair speeding ticket, a student penalized because of poor handwriting.  What is important is to have clear channels of redress.  If a teacher thinks their ranking is unfair, they should by all means make the case to change it. 

Note how that doesn’t happen when the rankings aren’t part of the evaluation.  If the rankings don’t matter then teachers have no reason to correct them and they don’t mean anything.  In other words, it isn’t a ranking at all if there are no consequences.

More goodness in teacher evaluations:Students

Courtesy of the Gates foundation.  Novel concept- students who spend an ungodly number of hours with teachers over the course of a year maybe come out knowing something about how effective or ineffective the teacher is.

More efforts on teacher rating

The Gates Foundation gets into the act in a big way.  I especially liked the comments on using retired principals or teachers to review video of teacher performance.  Why not expand that to parents as well?

One of the craziest mismatches in education is the number of people who want to help their kids vs. the number of people who can improve what goes on in school.  Video allows time-shifting and space-shifting, vastly expanding the pool of people a principal could draw on.

LA Times Grades the Teachers

This is an enormously interesting article.

I'm sure this isn't the first time a researcher has ranked teachers, or that a district has reviewed such rankings, but to put such rankings into the hands of parents is radical. It's the first time I've seen anyone- company, school district, non-profit, ANYONE- put into the hands of parents a tool for evaluating individual teacher quality.