Access to Teacher Evaluations Divides Advocates

As the movement to overhaul teacher evaluation marches onward, an emerging question is splitting the swath of advocates who support the new tools used to gauge teacher performance: Who should get access to the resulting information?

As evidenced in recently published opinion pieces, the contours of the debate are rapidly being drawn. Some proponents of using student-achievement data as a component of teacher evaluations, including the philanthropist Bill Gates and Teach For America founder Wendy Kopp, nevertheless believe that such information should not be made widely public. Other figures, like New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, champion the broad dissemination of such data.

Regarding teacher evaluations, the policy landscape for disclosures is also in flux. An Education Week review shows that access to teachers' evaluation results is permissible under open-records laws in at least 18 states plus the District of Columbia, though they are often unclear as to specifics. And only Florida and Michigan have established policies requiring that parents be notified if their child's teacher repeatedly performs poorly on his or her evaluations.

Unpredictable Stances

The debate is poised to grow noisier, as news organizations continue to pursue teacher-performance information.

Open and Shut

Nineteen states exempt individual teacher-evaluation ratings from disclosure under open-records laws. The others permit disclosure, though often under certain conditions.

SOURCE: Education Week

"I think there are very few education policy issues where people's positions are not entirely predictable, and this is one of them," said Timothy Daly, the president of TNTP, formerly the New Teacher Project, a New York City-based teacher-training group that does not support mass publication of individual ratings.

Teachers' unions, meanwhile, have excoriated efforts by the news media to publish "value added" teacher ratings. But the unions, too, are facing the more nuanced question of whether disclosure could be appropriate under other contexts.

Gera L. Summerford, the president of the Tennessee Education Association, said she believes appropriate limits could be set based on the context of the requests.

"I've never had a problem with a parent coming to the office and requesting a private discussion about the evaluation with the principal," she said. "But when you get everything public in the form of numbers in a database, it's just a whole different picture, and I think it's misleading."

Media Pressure

Observers trace the interest in public disclosure of evaluations to projects conducted by news outlets in California and New York, in which they secured and published data on teachers.

In 2010, the Los Angeles Times conducted an analysis of student-performance data tied to individual teachers, collected over six years' time. It created a searchable database of teachers' names, with each instructor rated on his or her effectiveness in raising student-test scores.

Shortly after, New York newspapers filed open-records requests for similar data included on the city's "teacher data reports," which were provided only to teachers, principals, and superintendents. Those reports were finally released to the journalists last month.

In what amounts to a bit of irony, the newspapers based the results on value-added data collected by the school districts for purposes other than evaluation. It was precisely for that reason that the data was not protected from disclosure under the states' open-records laws.

Value-added data compare how a teacher's students performed from one year to the next compared with similar students taught by other teachers, holding constant factors like parental income that could skew scores.

Researchers generally agree that value-added measurements capture some degree of the differences in teacher quality. But they also say the estimates contain error and become more volatile when calculated with fewer years of achievement data.

Such limitations have been cited by critics of the papers' decision to publish, particularly in the instance of the New York data reports, some of which were based on small sample sizes containing large margins of error around the calculations. The newspapers, in the meantime, have defended the publication of the scores on the basis that teachers are public employees whose performance is of interest to the public at large.

The issue has divided influential figures in public education, some of whom believe public disclosure could scuttle the appetite among educators for changes to teacher evaluations. That was essentially Mr. Gates' position in an op-ed essay in The New York Times a day before the newspaper made the data available.

"Developing a systematic way to help teachers get better is the most powerful idea in education today. The surest way to weaken it is to twist it into a capricious exercise in public shaming," he wrote. (Mr. Gates co-chairs the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which helps support Education Week's coverage of business and K-12 innovation.)

As a testament to the complexity of the issues, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's thinking on the matter has evolved since 2010. Though he credited the Los Angeles Times project for spotlighting data that, at that time, was going unheeded, Mr. Duncan said he doesn't support publication as a general rule.

"There's not much of an upside there, and there's a tremendous downside for teachers," he said. "We're at a time where morale is at a record low. We need to be strengthening teachers, and elevating them, and supporting them."

Open-Records Requests

States and districts, in the meantime, face a quandary over what they will have to produce if such information is requested by the news media or other individuals.

The review conducted by Education Week indicates that open-records laws in 18 states and the District of Columbia permit access to individual teachers' evaluation results. An additional 19 states do not allow such access, while the other states require teacher or third-party approval.

Florida has allowed the public to access parts of teachers' personnel files under sunshine laws since 1983, though access to them is made available the year after the review is conducted. Very few parents have chosen to look at those records, according to officials in the Hillsborough County, Miami-Dade, and Orange County school systems, three of the largest in the state.

Still, with new evaluation systems coming online, there could be an increased appetite for the information.

In Tennessee, one of the first states using a revamped, statewide teacher-evaluation system, the open-records law is written in such a way so that while the components that make up the evaluation are probably protected from release, teachers' summary evaluation scores—tallied on a 1-to-5 scale—might not be.

Tennessee state schools Superintendent Kevin Huffman said his agency's lawyers would have to look at each request for such information individually. But as a matter of general policy, the state does not believe summary ratings should be published, he added.

"We think the teacher evaluations provide the opportunity for good conversations between ...

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