January 27 2010 Meeting On Teachers Being Evaluated By Their Students' Test Scores

part five: January 27, 2010

Can New York City Teachers be Evaluated by their Students’ Test Scores? Should they be?

Sean Corcoran, Assistant Professor of Educational Economics, New York University

Wednesday, January 27, 2010 from 4:30 PM - 6:30 PM (ET)

Where
Professional Staff Congress, CUNY
61 Broadway, 16th floor
cross-streets Rector & Exchange Place
New York NY

In 2009, the New York City Department of Education developed a “value-added” model for measuring teacher effectiveness based on student test scores. This new measurement tool epitomizes a larger national movement to evaluate, promote, compensate, and dismiss teachers in part on the basis of their students’ test results.

Can standardized test scores be used as a meaningful measure of teacher quality? Should New York City teachers be evaluated based on their students’ performance on these tests? In this presentation, Sean Corcoran will describe some of the opportunities and challenges associated with value-added methods of assessing teacher quality. In particular, he will illustrate how standardized test scores can be used (or misused) in evaluating teachers. A particularly important issue is statistical uncertainty: because outside factors play such a large role in student progress, value-added estimates are only a crude estimate of a teacher's true effectiveness. Importantly, this uncertainty – and in turn the utility of value – added measures-varies across schools, grade levels, student subgroups, and communities. He concludes by assessing the potential for these new teacher assessment systems to improve student outcomes in urban school systems like New York.