A New York State court on Tuesday threw out a teacher’s evaluation for the 2013-14 school year, based on a controversial state rating system, saying that it had been “arbitrary and capricious.” But the court stopped short of ruling on the evaluation system more broadly because the state has already begun replacing it.
For the 2012-13 school year, Sheri G. Lederman, a longtime teacher in the high-performing Great Neck public school district, on Long Island, received what was known as a growth score of 14 points out of a possible 20; the score was meant to calculate student progress over time. Her students scored substantially higher than the state average on annual standardized tests in English and math, and her score put her in the “effective” range.
The next year, her students scored a bit better on the math test than they had the year before, and slightly lower on the English exam. But her growth score plummeted to one out of 20, or “ineffective.”
Ms. Lederman sued John B. King Jr., then the commissioner of the State Education Department, alleging that the growth-score portion of the state’s teacher evaluation system was biased against teachers whose students were consistently high scorers. Ms. Lederman was represented in the case by her husband, Bruce H. Lederman.
Mr. King is now the secretary of education for the United States Department of Education.
Justice Roger D. McDonough of State Supreme Court in Albany vacated Ms. Lederman’s 2013-14 growth score in part because of the difficulty in measuring growth for students who already perform above grade level on state tests.
The court’s decision does not extend beyond Ms. Lederman, in a sense because she had so much company in her opposition to the evaluation system.
The system was intended to hold teachers accountable for lagging student performance using quantifiable data. But it spawned outrage around the state, culminating last year when 20 percent of students in New York opted out of annual state tests for third through eighth graders.
In December, state education officials voted to exclude test scores from teacher evaluations until at least 2019, when a new growth model will be introduced.
A spokeswoman for the State Education Department said it was department policy not to comment on litigation.
