Reign Of Error: The Publication Of Teacher Data Reports In New York City
Late last week and over the weekend, New York City newspapers, including the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, published the value-added scores (teacher data reports) for thousands of the city’s teachers. Prior to this release, I and others argued that the newspapers should present margins of error along with the estimates. To their credit, both papers did so.
In the Times’ version, for example, each individual teacher’s value-added score (converted to a percentile rank) is presented graphically, for math and reading, in both 2010 and over a teacher’s “career” (averaged across previous years), along with the margins of error. In addition, both papers provided descriptions and warnings about the imprecision in the results. So, while the decision to publish was still, in my personal view, a terrible mistake, the papers at least make a good faith attempt to highlight the imprecision.
That said, they also published data from the city that use teachers’ value-added scores to label them as one of five categories: low, below average, average, above average or high. The Times did this only at the school level (i.e., the percent of each school’s teachers that are “above average” or “high”), while the Journal actually labeled each individual teacher. Presumably, most people who view the databases, particularly the Journal's, will rely heavily on these categorical ratings, as they are easier to understand than percentile ranks surrounded by error margins. The inherent problems with these ratings are what I’d like to discuss, as they illustrate important concepts about estimation error and what can be done about it.