Letting Teachers Teach: Publishing Classroom-level Data Would be Unfair to Teachers

The arguments over how to improve our educational system and our teachers are never ending. The Utah State Office of Education is struggling with one such conflict on how to deal with standardized testing data. The Salt Lake Tribune reported that one Utah law directs the Office to include testing data in their online reports all the way down to the classroom level, which means that teachers would be identified. However, another law directs the Office to keep teacher evaluation materials confidential. Some would say that parents have a right to this information about their children's teachers. I would argue that releasing these numbers without information on context of the classrooms and students the teachers were dealing with is unfair to teachers.

Let me first attempt to establish what “fairness” means, if that's possible. It is, most primitively, a gut reaction. It is a subconscious moral conception common in our culture and society. It is a feeling that something, somehow, is not equal among several parts. In this case, I would argue that the lack of “fairness” is based on an unequal distribution of rights. The “right” of the parent is outweighing the “right” of the teacher to honest and correct evaluation and protection from defamation. It is also unequal procedurally. The parents are awarded procedures to protect their rights, but the teacher is awarded no such procedure.

The standardized testing data that would be provided for different classroom teachers are only numbers. State Senator Stephen Urquhart, who supports this policy, said, “People are not stupid. They understand there are many different data points and they can use those however they want” (link). No one is saying that parents are stupid. However, statistics can be easily misconstrued and do not relate the number of students in a classroom or the demographics of those students. Not everyone will interpret the numbers correctly, and certainly there will be misunderstandings of the many factors that go into standardized test scores.

One factor that affects scores is whether a teacher takes on students with learning disabilities or other difficulties. Patti Harrington, a representative of the Utah School Boards Association, worried that “teachers who now take on special education students, kids learning English and children with other challenges, might veer away from working with such pupils in the future if they know they’ll be judged for their lower scores” (link). We shouldn't be penalizing teachers for working with difficult students.

Classroom sizes are also an important consideration. A friend of mine who works in a Utah school recently related to me that a fellow teacher was so popular among parents at her school that at the beginning of the school year several parents had their children moved into her class. While class sizes were equal beforehand, she now had about 30 students while another teacher in her grade only had around 20. Class sizes can affect grades considerably. Shouldn't this informaiton be considered in evaluating teachers?

A recent editorial by Ann Florence, a Utah teacher, pointed out several other concerns. She noted that a computer shortage in her school caused teachers to administer tests during different weeks, which means some teachers could have considerably more teaching time before tests than others.

Florence also noted that her school's students had considerably more support at home than many others. She wrote: “Most of our students are supported at home by educated and employed parents and have had childhoods filled with music lessons, sports, and vacations. We freely admit that our students' test results do not truly reflect our teaching skills." In this context, it may be acceptable to compare between teachers at this school, but it would be a shame if parents compared teachers across schools.

Publishing classroom-level testing data without context or background is unfair to teachers, especially with the stated purpose of parents being able to make judgments from them. It is unfair to consider only the rights of parents without giving consideration to the rights of teachers to honest and correct evaluation, protection from defamation, and due procedure.

Some Articles of Interest from the Salt Lake Tribune:

Should Utah Schools Publish Data on Teachers? AG to weigh in
A Teacher Asks: Why Teach?
Should Utah parents get to see teacher performance data?
Utah's Overwhelmed Teachers