The worst 8th-grade math teacher in NY City.

Her name is Carolyn Abbott and, according to recently published evaluations of NYC public school teachers, she is the worst 8th-grade math teacher in the city. Let's look at the rest of the story, then you decide.

Abbott teaches 7th and 8th grade math. On the grade 4-8 NYS ELA test, 32% of 7th grade teachers had students with lower "value-added" scores, and 0% of 8th-grade teachers had students with lower "value-added" scores. Not a single 8th-grade math teacher had students with a lower "value-added" score! What parent in their right mind would want their child in the classroom of such an incompetent instructor?

It might be reasonable to assume that Abbott teaches in one of those gang-ruled hellholes we all hear about as a NYC public school. But that would be wrong. Abbott teaches at the Anderson School, a citywide gifted and talented school on the upper west side. Incredible! She must really be a loser if she can't "add value" for kids who actually want to be in school and have a thirst for knowledge.

We'll pick up her story as told by the Sociological Look at Education blog of prof. Allan Pallas: "Using a statistical technique called value-added modeling, the Teacher Data Reports compare how students are predicted to perform on the state ELA and math tests, based on their prior year’s performance, with their actual performance. Teachers whose students do better than predicted are said to have “added value”; those whose students do worse than predicted are “subtracting value.” By definition, about half of all teachers will add value, and the other half will not."

"Carolyn Abbott was, in one respect, a victim of her own success. After a year in her classroom, her seventh-grade students scored at the 98th percentile of New York City students on the 2009 state test. As eighth-graders, they were predicted to score at the 97th percentile on the 2010 state test. However, their actual performance was at the 89th percentile of students across the city. That shortfall—the difference between the 97th percentile and the 89th percentile—placed Abbott near the very bottom of the 1,300 eighth-grade mathematics teachers in New York City." Well, perhaps Abbott didn't do a very good job of teaching the material on the 8th-grade test. Read on, grasshopper.

"How could this happen? Anderson is an unusual school, as the students are often several years ahead of their nominal grade level. The material covered on the state eighth-grade math exam is taught in the fifth or sixth grade at Anderson. “I don’t teach the curriculum they’re being tested on,” Abbott explained. “It feels like I’m being graded on somebody else’s work. The math that she teaches is more advanced, culminating in high-school level algebra and a different and more challenging test, New York State’s Regents exam in Integrated Algebra.” [Emphasis mine.]

"Because student performance on the state ELA and math tests is used to calculate scores on the Teacher Data Reports, the tests are high-stakes for teachers; and because New York City uses a similar statistical strategy to rank schools, they are high-stakes for schools as well. But the tests are not high-stakes for the eighth-graders at Anderson."

"By the time they take the eighth-grade tests in the spring of the year, they already know which high school they will be attending, and their scores on the test have no consequences. “The eighth-graders don’t care; they rush through the exam, and they don’t check their work,” Abbott said. “The test has no effect on them. I can’t make an argument that it counts for kids. The seventh-graders, they care a bit more.”

"The state tests, she believes, are poorly equipped to assess real mathematical knowledge, especially for high-performing students. “They’re so basic; they ask you to explain things that are obvious if you’re three years ahead,” she says. The Anderson students “understand it at a different level. They want to explain with equations, not words.” But the scoring of the free-response items on the tests emphasizes a formulaic response, with the scoring instructions often looking for a single keyword in a response to garner credit. They’re not accepting answers that are mathematically correct,” Abbott notes, “and accepting answers that aren’t mathematically correct.”

"How do her students perform on the content that she actually does teach? This year, the 64 eighth-graders at Anderson she teaches are divided into two groups, an honors section and a regular section. All but one of the students in the honors section took the Regents Integrated Algebra exam in January; the other student and most of the regular-section students will take the exam in June. All of the January test-takers passed with flying colors, and more than one-third achieved a perfect score of 100 on the exam." [Emphasis mine.]

Yet Carolyn Abbott has been publicly shamed--teacher evaluation scores were published in NYC newspapers and other media--as the worst 8th-grade math teacher in the entire city. Even though her principal, her students and their parents know her as a great teacher, Carolyn Abbott is leaving teaching and entering the Ph.D. program in mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison this fall.

Way to go New York!