Dive Brief:
- Errors in around 1% of the test-based ratings given to New York state teachers and principals have been found, and will be recalculated.
- A contractor, American Institutes for Research, is blamed for the mistake, which affected 250 principals and teachers.
- Despite the small margin of error, scores for 40,000+ educators in New York state will now be recalculated at the contractor's expense, the New York Times reports.
Dive Insight:
Although there's always room for error when performance metrics are calculated, this high-profile error comes at a peak time for opponents of tying student test scores to teacher performance.
In New York last December, the Board of Regents voted to postpone the use of test scores in teacher evaluations for four years. That vote stood in stark opposition to the NY state legislature's earlier decision to increase focus on the use of test scores in measuring teacher efficacy. Moving forward, because the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) grants states greater power over accountability measurements, New York could theoretically abandon test-based teacher evaluations entirely.
California, Iowa, Montana, Nebraska, and Vermont lack a formal policy requiring the use of student performance metrics in teacher evaluations. And in North Carolina, test-based school rankings are on the way out after opponents claimed that they led to cheating scandals and put unfairly intense pressure on educators.
Before ESSA, the Obama administration had shifted focus away from strict teacher evaluations.
