Dallas schools teacher ratings sometimes off mark

Kent Fischer:

Seth Johnson teaches Spanish at Madison High School. Yet when he received a district report that rated his performance, he was surprised to see his rating dragged down by two classes of low-scoring French students – classes he didn’t teach, and couldn’t have because he doesn’t speak French.
“They put my name on a class that I never taught,” Mr. Johnson said. He filed a complaint with the district this week.
As the Dallas public schools promote a complex teacher rating system as an impartial way to award bonuses and identify bad teachers, records and interviews indicate that the calculations are not infallible.
In all, 116 teachers challenged the accuracy of their “Classroom Effectiveness Index” reports this year. The CEIs are numerical ratings given to teachers based on gains their students made on classroom and state exams.