(Update in February, 2012: Terrible News: New York To Make Teacher Ratings Public)

Here are additional updates:

New York Teacher Ratings Released — “At Best Unwise, At Worst Absurd”
Here’s an excellent television interview about it:

Teachers’ Ratings To Go Public: MyFoxNY.com

Why the release of the Teacher data reports and adoption of a new statewide evaluation system will be bad for teachers and bad for kids is from New York City Public School Parents.

Value-added? Not much: what the Teacher Data Reports won’t tell us is by Aaron Pallas.

If Newspapers Are Going To Publish Teachers’ Value-Added Scores, They Need To Publish Error Margins Too is by Matthew Di Carlo.

Bill Gates — Yes, Bill Gates — Calls Making Teaching Ratings Public “A Big Mistake”

Teacher Quality Widely Diffused, Ratings Indicate is from The New York Times. That paper is publishing the ratings, despite the article saying:

The ratings, known as teacher data reports, covered three school years ending in 2010, and are intended to show how much value individual teachers add by measuring how much their students’ test scores exceeded or fell short of expectations based on demographics and prior performance. Such “value-added assessments” are increasingly being used in teacher-evaluation systems, but they are an imprecise science. For example, the margin of error is so wide that the average confidence interval around each rating spanned 35 percentiles in math and 53 in English, the city said. Some teachers were judged on as few as 10 students.

NYC releases teachers’ value-added scores — unfortunately is by Valerie Strauss at The Washington Post.

After Championing Release, City Says It Did Not Want Teacher Data Public is from The New York Times.

The Wall Street Journal has published a surprisingly thoughtful video on the use of Value-Added Measures to evaluate teachers in New York City and elsewhere:

“The only way this will have any kind of a positive impact,” she said, “would be if people see how ridiculous this is and it gives New York State pause about how they are going about teacher evaluation.”

The New York Times has this quote from a principal in its latest article about publishing the public ratings of teachers, In Teacher Ratings, Good Test Scores Are Sometimes Not Good Enough.

Reign Of Error: The Publication Of Teacher Data Reports In New York City is from The Shanker Blog.

A principal at a high performing school explains why she is “absolutely sick” about the public release of the TDRs” is from NYC Public School Parents.

Big Apple’s Rotten Ratings is by David B. Cohen.

Applying a Precise Label to a Rough Number is by Michael Winerip at The New York Times.

The True Story of Pascale Mauclair demonstrates the damage this kind of fiasco can cause.

How to Demoralize Teachers is by Diane Ravitch.

Test scores mean nothing appeared in the New York Daily News.

Integral to “value-added” is a requirement that some score low is from Gotham Schools.

Hard-Working Teachers, Sabotaged When Student Test Scores Slip is from The New York Times.

The worst eighth-grade math teacher in New York City is by Aaron Pallas.

Oh boy, here we go again. A New York court ruled today that teacher ratings based on the value-added model can be released to the media with teacher names attached. The teacher’s union is filing an appeal.

This is wrong on so many levels. The L.A. Times originally opened up this can of worms, and you can read about that at The Best Posts About The LA Times Article On “Value-Added” Teacher Ratings. All those posts are directly relevant to this New York situation.

Because those posts say so much about the problem of the value-added model and the terrible idea of releasing the ratings to the public, I don’t anticipate re-inventing the wheel with a very lengthy list here. But I will add pieces that come out and that speak specifically about New York.

Here are my choices for The Best Posts & Articles About The New York Court Decision Releasing Teacher Ratings:

Appeals Court Says NYC Can Release Teacher Ratings is from The Associated Press.

I wrote about this New York case when it first came up last year, and you can find some useful links at that post.

NYC Ordered to Release Teacher Performance Data is from The Wall Street Journal.

Appellate Court Gets It Wrong on NYC Teacher Data is by Rick Hess at Education Week.

Evaluating New York Teachers, Perhaps the Numbers Do Lie is a New York Times article that actually shows the bizarre mathematical equation use to determine a New York City teacher’s value-added score.

Teacher Value-Added Scores: Publish And Perish is from The Shanker Blog. It’s actually about the LA Times fiasco, but I thought I’d include it in case you didn’t have time to review my “The Best…” list on that issue.

You might also be interested in The Best Resources For Learning About The “Value-Added” Approach Towards Teacher Evaluation.

Naive To Print Teachers’ Scores, Says TFA Founder is from Alexander Russo, who reports that Teach For America’s Wendy Kopp opposes the public release of teacher ratings. That’s good to hear though, as Alexander mentions, “I wish Kopp had been so clear back a year ago when this was all first being debated — it would have been brave and right of her…”

N.Y. appeals court rules that teacher ratings can be public is from The Los Angeles Times.

New York City teacher evaluations based on students’ test scores can be made public, court rules is from The New York Daily News.

Please let me know in the comments section if you have written a post about the article, or if you know of other good ones.

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You might also want to explore the 750 other “The Best…” lists I’ve compiled.