FAQ

New York City’s Teacher Data Reports were designed to show how much progress individual teachers helped students make in reading and math over the course of a year. From the 2007-08 through the 2009-10 school years, the New York City Department of Education (DOE) distributed these reports to schools and teachers in English and math, grades 4 through 8. The reports were designed to measure individual teachers’ contributions to student learning, as measured by New York State English and math exams, using a “value-added” method that takes into account factors outside of a teacher’s control like students’ previous performance or special education status.

In 2010, more than a dozen media outlets filed a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request for the DOE to release these Teacher Data Reports, including teachers’ names. The United Federation of Teachers (UFT) sued to prevent the release, and the DOE agreed to delay any release until the courts resolved the case. The legal process concluded in mid-February after several appeals, and the DOE is legally obligated to release this information, which we are doing on February 24, 2012. As a result, several media outlets will likely make the data publicly available.

We are releasing Teacher Data Report results for individual teachers from the 2007-08, 2008-09, and 2009-10 school years. All of the data in the reports will be released for each teacher, including:

• Percentile score (number from 0-99) and performance category (low, below average, average, above average, high)
• Current year and multi-year score
• Margins of error
• Results by student subgroup (e.g., English language learners, students with disabilities)

Our model met recognized standards for validity and reliability. Teachers’ value-added scores were positively correlated with school Progress Report scores and principals’ evaluations of teacher effectiveness. A teacher’s value-added score was highly stable from year to year, and the results for teachers in the top 25 percent and bottom 25 percent were particularly stable.

The Teacher Data Reports were an initial attempt to capture a teacher’s contribution to student learning. The report results were shared with teachers and their principals to support discussions around areas for improvement where teachers could receive professional development. In the 2008-09 and 2009-10 school years, the reports were used as one of multiple sources of information by principals in making tenure decisions.

Reports were generated for approximately 18,000 English language arts and math teachers who taught 4th-8th grade students in 2007-08, 2008-09, and 2009-10. Teachers did not receive these reports if they did not teach a subject that culminated in a state math or English exam, taught for less than the full year, or did not teach a minimum number of students required to receive a report. Teacher Data Reports were calculated for each grade and subject individually. One teacher may therefore have multiple reports (e.g., a teacher who teaches 4th grade math and English).

No. The DOE’s early work on Teacher Data Reports helped us learn how to measure teacher contributions to student learning most effectively, and we have shared our lessons learned with the State Education Department, which will release a new version of teacher value-added data in summer 2012. The State’s new teacher evaluation system will also include value-added analysis as part of a strong teacher evaluation system that incorporates measures of student learning as one of multiple measures and gives teachers the feedback and support they deserve as professionals.

Principals and teachers should access their reports through Get Your Reports in the Teacher Data Toolkit using their DOE e-mail username and password. For log-in or other technical questions, contact HR Connect at 718-935-4000.

This Web site provides information and resources that offer an overview of Teacher Data Reports. Teachers who need help accessing their reports can call HR Connect at 718-935-4000 and should talk with their principals if they have further questions. Parents of enrolled students should talk with their child’s principal or contact 311 for general information. Media inquiries should be submitted to the Office of Communications & Media Relations at 212-374-5141.

For each section of a teacher’s report, the percentile shows the percentage of teachers in the same subject, grade, and experience category whose value-added score was lower than the teacher’s. The experience categories are: 1st year teachers, 2nd year teachers, 3rd year teachers, and teachers with more than 3 years experience. For example, if Teacher A, a 1st-year 7th grade math teacher, has a percentile score of 87, that means that Teacher A’s value-added score is higher than 87% of 1st-year 7th grade math teachers.

Teacher Data Reports examine student performance on state tests from 2004-05 through 2009-10. In addition, the following student and classroom characteristics were used to calculate each student’s predicted score on the 2008-09 and 2009-10 Teacher Data Reports.

Student Characteristics

Classroom Characteristics

Prior year English language arts score Prior year math score Free or reduced-price lunch Special education status (differentiated by recommended services) English language learner status (differentiated by current and former English language learner) Number of suspensions (in prior year) Number of absences (in prior year) Student retained in grade (before prior year) Attended summer school New to school Ethnicity Gender

Average prior year English language arts score  Average prior year math score  Percent free or reduced-price lunch Percent special education status(differentiated by recommended services) Percent English language learner (ELL) status (differentiated by current and former English language learner) Average number of suspensions (in prior year) Average number of absences Percent retained in grade (before prior year) Percent attended summer school Percent new to school Percent by ethnicity Percent by gender Class size

Statistically, a teacher’s contribution to students’ test score gains most likely lies near, but may not be exactly equal to, the percentile result on the report. All statistical measures contain some uncertainty, reflected by what is known as a "margin of error" (also called a confidence interval). The margin of error provided in the Teacher Data Reports means we can be 95 percent certain that a teacher’s contribution falls in that range, most likely closer to the highlighted result than to either end of the range.

Larger margins of error indicate that there is more uncertainty about a teacher’s value-added percentile. The size of the margin of error differs for each calculation based on a number of factors, including the number of students included in the calculation. Margins of error will generally be smaller when a teacher has more years of data, has more students, or has a particularly high or low value-added score.

For each section of the 2008-09 and 2009-10 reports, data are presented only if teachers had at least 10 eligible students in each category. (For 6th, 7th, and 8th grade English language arts reports, the minimum number of students needed for a section of the report to be populated is 20 instead of 10.) For example, a teacher with 20 eligible students, four of whom are students with disabilities, will receive data on her impact on all 20 students’ progress but will not receive information about her impact on the progress of her students with disabilities as a separate category.

Although there is no relationship between value-added scores and prior student achievement, because there are fewer questions on the state tests differentiating students with particularly low and high performance, the value-added scores of teachers with very low- and high-performing students are more likely to be sensitive to changes in student test performance. These changes in percentile score are usually within the confidence interval (also known as range) of a teacher’s current percentile score. Principals and teachers should take this into account when viewing teachers’ value-added results.

The charts below show this pattern. The first chart shows the impact on teachers’ value-added percentile scores if all students in a teacher’s class had answered one more question correct. The second chart shows the impact on teachers’ value-added percentile scores if all students in a teacher’s class had answered one less question correct. (Note: The metric of every student in the class answering one more or one less question correct is not considered to be an insignificant change in performance but is used for illustrative purposes to understand the sensitivity of value-added to changes in student test performance.) These charts show that changes in value-added percentile scores are likely to be larger when teachers have very high-performing students. This is also the case for teachers with very low-performing students. However, these teachers are not shown because there are too few teachers in each grade/ subject with low-performing students to report their scores.




Notes: The green bars show the average increase in percentile score for teachers with a given 09-10 average scale score. For the 09-10 4th grade math test, 636 was the cut for Level 2, 676 was the cut for Level 3, and 707 was the cut for Level 4.