If you haven’t heard about this yet, please go read this article from the LA Times that describes the story of one LA area teacher who committed suicide due to the publishing (in the LA Times, mind you) of his “value-added” assessment scores as a teacher. While I’m the first one to argue that something like this is not worth committing suicide over, a catalyst is a catalyst, and without it this teacher might still be alive.

If you haven’t heard about value-added teacher evaluations yet, you will very soon. This story is very likely to skyrocket the issue into the mainstream media.

In the meantime, also go read this article on the Gotham Schools blog that reviews a study written by my brother, Sean Corcoran at NYU, regarding the ineffectiveness of the value-added assessment-driven teacher evaluations.