Steve Nelson: Why Would Any Sane Person Want to Teach?

And someone was surely going to get pilloried. Once a "bell curve" methodology is established, someone is going to fall into the lower categories, regardless of actual competence. It's rather like placing the Miami Heat starting five on a bell curve scale. By this measurement, Dwyane Wade is an average basketball player. Compounding this piece of foolishness was the Department's admission that the statistical margin of error was as high as 53%. This means that Wade might be averaging 26 points per game or, well, maybe actually 13. Who knows. Many teachers in apparently "high performing" schools were rated "low" because of this 53% error margin or due to the liability of being on a relatively strong team. This statistical unreliability is only a small part of the problem.

Worse, perhaps, is that the rankings emphasized how teachers improved (or not) from year to year, without regard to where they started. Punishing the basketball analogy, this means that if D-Wade averaged 26 points per game in 2010-11 but only 22 in 2011-12, he would be deemed "below average" when compared with an off-the-bench player at an inferior franchise who raised his production from 8 points per game to 12.