Dive Brief:

• In a letter sent last week to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, state Education Chancellor Merryl Tisch and acting Commissioner Elizabeth Berlin suggested that a state law be created to prohibit students from being assigned "ineffective" teachers two years in a row.
• The two education leaders argue that similar laws have already been enacted in Indiana, Florida, and Rhode Island, and that it would ultimately serve as a protective law for students. 
• The letter also suggested revising the state's teacher evaluation system to make to easier to remove teachers who have been rated "ineffective" two consecutive years. 

Dive Insight:

The letter follows an open statement by Cuomo in which he revealed his intentions to update and reform the state's current evaluation system. While Cuomo initially agreed not to count student test scores as highly on teacher evaluations during the first few years of the state's transition to Common Core standards, he recently backtracked on this idea, saying that last year's teacher evaluations, which found that only 1.2% of the state's teachers were ranked as "ineffective," indicated a need for more scrutiny.

What is important to consider when thinking about both Cuomo's promise for reforms in 2015 and Tisch and Berlin's request is the fact that teacher evaluations and rankings don't always accurately measure which teachers are effective or not. In fact, the American Statistical Association (ASA) says the widely popular “value-added method” (VAM) for conducting teacher evaluations is unreliable.

This detail is important. If schools are going to make it easier to get rid of ineffective teachers, it would be wise to make sure their metric for determining who is and isn't ineffective is sound.