New York Publishes Teacher Rankings
On Friday morning, the New York City Department of Education released ratings of 18,000 teachers, based on how much their students had improved in math and English as measured by state tests. New York is the second city, after Los Angeles, to publish teachers names and their ratings.
The teachers union has been fighting their release for a year and a half, and even Bill Gates chimed in on Wednesday in the opinion pages of The New York Times, calling it a "capricious exercise in public shaming." Douglas N. Harris, an economist at the University of Wisconsin, who helped develop the rankings, said that publicly releasing them "strikes me as at best unwise, at worst absurd."
