"Top Teachers" in NY's Teacher Data Reports

Teacher rankings are out now in New York. The teachers' union has fought for more than a year to block the release of the ratings, taking the fight to the Supreme Court. All of this comes about because of a state-mandated overhaul of the teacher evaluation system that the state promised Washington in order to qualify for $700 million in federal Race to the Top funds.

At the top, according to the New York Times today, is Walter Galiano, Jr., who, now an assistant principal, is traveling in Italy. Alison Epstein, another teacher at the top of the city's Teacher Data Reports, has been transferred to a gifted class from teaching special education in small class settings. "It's definitely a benefit to have a smaller classroom," she said of her class of 17, "because you can differentiate so much easier."

The rankings come with asterisks and margins or error. (See an example, teacher names and naked statistics here.) But they purport to tell the truth about which teachers are adding value to students and which ones are not. The "top teachers" themselves interpret the results differently. Epstein says that it's largely because of class size that allows her to focus on individual students. Another teacher at the top of the list, Natalie Guandique, who has also left the classroom to finish a master's degree at Columbia, attributes her success to having high expectations for her special-education students. "I came in and said, 'They will learn this,'" Ms. Guandique said. "It may take us a longer time and we may have to take a different path, but they will learn what the other students are learning."

What do these "top teachers" have to teach us? It's a tantalizing question. Is it differentiated instruction? Is it a "can do" attitude? Would a close examination of their classrooms, their attitudes, their assessments, their opening-class routines demonstrate something reproducible? My mind reels at the notion that we could watch the game film of these teachers in action and learn some valuable tricks to spread to other instructors, like that poor teacher with a 2% rating. It could be the case that there's a treasure chest of information there.

I worry: is this search for top teachers a red herring, filled with too many statistical anomalies to be considered useful? Would we learn anything new.... anything, say, that you wouldn't find in Doug Lemov's fine book about instruction, "Teach Like a Champion"? And I worry about the fact that all of the teachers have moved on from their "winning" classrooms. I worry about what that means about the sustainability of this kind of teaching.

I suspect that it could be, as Alison Epstein, one of the "top teachers," says, that the focus on these tests "at times detracts from the overall curriculum." The halo of pressure about the ranking, about student performance on a single test, on out-thinking and out-teaching the test has more detrimental effects than the positive effects of the ranking. "The pressure for teachers and children to perform for tests," Epstein continues, "that do not really show how intelligent a student is, or how amazing a teacher might be, is substantial."

If the goal is to improve instruction for all teachers, this seems like a bizzarre, Byzantine way to do it.