Opinion

Grading teacher colleges

Whether it’s the batting average for a pro baseball player, the stars Michelin awards restaurants or the price/earnings ratio of a company’s stock — people insist on good ratings to evaluate performance. Now the city is doing the same for teacher colleges.

It’s about time.

The city Department of Education just released a new scorecard. In its own words, it measures “the performance of new teachers from 2008-12 of the 12 education programs that supplied the most educators” to our public schools. Since a good teacher in the classroom is arguably the single most important factor in student performance, we’re not going to get better performance out of our students until we are first sure our teachers measure up.

It’s no secret that the traditional education degrees at many colleges are mediocre. But the city’s scorecard shows that when it comes to improving student test scores, even an elite university such as Columbia had 20 percent not as effective as they should be. The comparative figure for City College of New York, another big supplier of teachers, was 10 percent.

No doubt people will argue about what these measures tell us and what they don’t. Just as a batting average doesn’t tell you all you need to know about a baseball player, the scores on these performance measures may not be the whole story. But the way to get a fuller picture isn’t to lose these meassures, but to get more of them.

In particular, we’re looking forward to next year, when the state will have more rigorous standards in place — and those measures will include teachers from innovative programs such as Teach for America. The good ones should welcome the competition.