In Brooklyn, Hard-Working Teachers, Sabotaged When Student Test Scores Slip - NYTimes.com

The unintended consequences of "value-added" measurements.

In Brooklyn, Hard-Working Teachers, Sabotaged When Student Test Scores Slip - NYTimes.com: "In 2010, in the hope of winning a grant from the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program, state officials and the teachers’ unions agreed to let students’ test scores count for 20 percent of a teacher’s evaluation. Then last spring, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, John B. King Jr., the state’s education commissioner, and Merryl H. Tisch, the state chancellor, decided 20 percent wasn’t rigorous enough, and with little public notice pushed a measure through the Board of Regents allowing student test scores to count for up to 40 percent.

It does not take a lot of math to calculate how much damage Ms. Sangree’s 1 or Ms. Byam’s 7 could do.

How could this possibly have happened?

The short answer is: Numbers lie.

And not only do they lie, but they are out of date, in this case covering student test results from 2007 to 2010."

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