When they discovered that fewer than 5% of all teachers in NYS public schools were found to be “ineffective” the gov was disappointed. Turns out their untested, poorly designed evaluation system that links student test scores to teacher effectiveness, wasn’t blaming teachers effectively enough. So yesterday, the governor announced plans to up the ratio of student test scores to teacher effectiveness. Now, instead of it being 40% of a teacher’s score, it’s up to 50%.
Hopefully, more “ineffective” teachers will show up in the ratings. Then we can get rid of them. After all, we all know that teachers are singularly responsibile for poverty, learning disabilities and poor language skills.
Maybe next year they will raise the percentage to 99%. That should give us a nice, fat glut of lousy pedagogues.
"Yo Miz" Elizabeth Rose's Blog 
Elizabeth, I think you hit the nail on the head with your comments concerning the search for ways to find teachers ineffective. As long as we treat teachers and students as if they were data-driven stocks, I believe our educational system will continue to have high teacher turnover with very little positive results. After all, the beauty of data (as seen in politics) is that it can be skewed to support anyone’s contentions and anyone’s set of values.
I appreciate your comment, Jeff. Data can, indeed, be skewed and much of this kind of VAM-connected data needs to be skewered.