I am a New York City public school teacher. The New York Times and WNYC have committed a grave public disservice. Much has been written about basic tenets of journalistic integrity: Is this data accurate and reliable? What conclusions can be drawn? But more fundamental to this decision are basic considerations of ethics and decency.

People are being hurt. As the Times has reported, in the only other instance of publicly released teacher data, Los Angeles teacher Rigoberto Ruelas committed suicide. Public school teachers routinely endure humiliation at the hands of policy-makers that have little knowledge of how children learn or what sustains a vibrant learning community.

The amount of political energy bent on building and sustaining testing regimes is demoralizing to teachers who have committed their life's work to struggling with the complexities of student learning and the artistry of effective teaching. Their integrity is compromised daily by the pressures of education fads and "data-driven" doublespeak. Countless teachers sacrifice their own well-being to shelter their students from these pressures. They teach children preoccupied with concerns of family and friendships. They see children whose curiosities and inquiries take curriculum in unexpected directions, children that want to be active, children that want to be immersed in art. I have not met a teacher that has not been deeply committed to placing the needs of students at the center of their practice. But this political climate of testing and sanctions is suffocating the profession.

Teachers are leaving. New York City's three-year hiring freeze has shut-out recent graduates of schools of education--teachers that have committed themselves to formal preparation programs that teach the intellectual tradition of education and the growing body of research on student learning. Alternative certification programs have thrived in this climate, sending the message that academic elites or career-changers from more "rigorous" professions will redeem a deflated profession. It is difficult to imagine that the profession could be any more devalued than it has been in New York City in recent years.

Education historian Diane Ravitch, among others, have offered astute analyses of the effects of testing and accountability on American Education. The New York Times and WNYC will enter that history as complicit in the statistical smoke and mirrors and the shameful devaluing of teachers.

As a science teacher, and a former researcher, I have to say that I was more than a little dismayed by the publication of this data. The margin of error on any of these scores are so wide as to make the data meaningless. If these were the results of a political poll, would they be released? I think it highly unlikely.

More to the point, any parent looking at these scores could easily get the impression that their child's teacher is "failing" or "excelling." Interpreting these data properly require a certain amount of understanding of statistics, and particularly of how a margin of error affects the value of any particular measurement. To give an analogy, this is like a doctor measuring your weight with a scale that could be off twenty pounds either way. Would we trust a doctor who uses a tool that imprecise?

Having access to data, and reporting them in the way that the New York Times and NPR did through SchoolBook are two different things. Rather than "calling out" each individual teacher on their scores, it would have been more responsible to provide a random sampling of the scores, noting that because the margin of error on each score is so great that it renders the score essentially meaningless.

While I usually turn to both the New York Times and NPR for excellence in reporting, this is one time when they truly dropped the ball. Like my colleague above, I fear that people's professional reputations and careers will be ruined by this irresponsible action.

What do you think of the city's decision to release its ratings for 12,700 teachers?
Let me respond to this question in testing language. What is the author's purpose in drafting this question? Answer: To make it appear that the city, on it's own accord, provided the NYT with teacher data.
Short answer response to the non-fiction (but I use that term loosely) articles on teacher data published by the NYT in the last few days: Based on details from the articles I think a better question would be: "What do you think of the NYT's decision to force the city, by court order, to release teacher data with a margin of error of 50 and then create a website that allows you to view only the names of teachers who work in unionized schools - charter schools teacher data is not being released - then publish articles that draw conclusions about a teacher's effectiveness or ineffectiveness based on the egregiously flawed data all in the name of the Freedom of Information?"
On the KWL chart I made while reading these articles, I made these notes: NYT’s what I would like to know is why are you not publishing data on every single teacher who taught in a public school during the years 2007-2010? Not only is data from charter schools excluded, but data on teachers who taught in the same building on the same grade level is also excluded. The averages on your website are not true averages because they are not calculated with data on all teachers.
Short answer persuasive essay on why THIS data should not be used to draw conclusions about a teacher's effectiveness: I believe very strongly in gathering data, it improves my teaching enormously, but I believe in accurate data calculation. Students should have the best teachers possible, but becoming a great teacher takes time – most say 5 years. The data on your website compares some teachers in their first two years of teaching with veteran teachers of 20 years and then makes the claim that the lower scoring teacher was ineffective. Teachers in their first few years of teaching should be mentored by outstanding teachers so they can become outstanding teachers, not be subjected to this public humiliation. A great teacher could be inside of a beginning teacher, but if used the way the DOE is proposing this data be used, a whole lot of these second year teachers would be fired because they did not get the same results as a 20 year veteran teacher.

I don't live in New York City but I wonder what is gained by publishing this information. I don't understand how a system with a margin of error of plus/minus 35% is valid. Does the Board of Education plan on devising a system to rate the parents on how they support or don't support the teacher. I wonder how many parents will move in order to shop for teachers that "scored" well?

Wow, what an incredible invasion of privacy. Not only of the parents but the students as well. I really thought more of the NYT than this. Maybe the HuffPo should write an article that lists print newspapers' subscriber numbers from the 90's to present, +/- 35%. Then we can use our fuzzy math interpretation skills to deduce that once great papers are now so desperate for market share that undermining education of 1000s of children isn't below them.