Even Gates doesn't like shaming teachers in public

N.Y. Times graphic

Publicly shaming teachers in N.Y. and L.A. is too much even for Bill Gates. In a NYT opinion piece, ("Shame is Not the Solution") he continues to defend the use of inaccurate, misleading, and now widely discredited, value-added formulas, as "one important piece" of ranking individual teachers. But the most powerful of the power philanthropists wants these evaluations kept out of the press. He's at least got that right.

Unfortunately, some education advocates in New York, Los Angeles and other cities are claiming that a good personnel system can be based on ranking teachers according to their “value-added rating” — a measurement of their impact on students’ test scores — and publicizing the names and rankings online and in the media. But shaming poorly performing teachers doesn’t fix the problem because it doesn’t give them specific feedback.        

Of course that's not the only problem with value-added.

Gates says he and wife Melinda were "blown away" by the system of evaluation used in Hillsborough County, Florida  public schools where, he says, teachers "receive in-depth feedback from their principal and from a peer evaluator, both of whom have been trained to analyze classroom teaching."

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Wait! Gates takes a poke at L.A. here. But isn't Deasy his boy? The man from Gates?