Dive Brief:

• The results of New York state's teacher evaluations show discrepancies between principal observation scores and student test score indications.  
• Student test scores are worth 40% of a teacher's overall evaluation, and according to data, while 4% of teachers were deemed ineffective based on test scores, only 1% were flagged by principal observations.  
• Highlighting the somewhat soft approach principals took during this first round of observations:  98% of New York state teachers were deemed “effective” or “highly effective” by principals in the observation section, which is worth 60% of the eval.  

Dive Insight:

The new teacher evaluations were created to better discern who is an effective teacher. Making the evaluations more nuanced was a step to make clearer distinctions between teachers. Clearly, it did not go as planned. With 98% of the state's teachers deemed "effective" or "highly effective," it would be difficult to find any hierarchy or variance in the final evaluations.  

StudentsFirstNY Executive Director Jenny Sedlis told Chalkbeat New York that the results were somewhat confusing and contradictory. “Any part of the teacher evaluation system that finds zero percent of teachers to be ineffective, when less than a third of students are on grade level, raises serious questions,” Sedlis said.

Recommended Reading:

New York Chalkbeat : Few principals statewide gave teachers low marks in first round of ...