Some NY educators got erroneous evaluations

Oops.

About 250 teachers and principals received erroneous test results on their performance evaluations.

In a letter to administrators Friday, the state Education Department stressed that any mistakes will be corrected and the number of educators impacted was small: about one-half of one percent of the 40,000 who received scores.

The problem was with the vendor the state uses: American Institutes for Research.

"No teacher-level State-provided growth scores were impacted by this data processing error," the memo states.

"However, a small number of district/BOCES implemented APPR plans during the 2014-15 school year included school-wide measures based on a state provided building-level growth score for the State Growth or Other Comparable Measures subcomponent or the Locally Selected Measures subcomponent."

Dennis Tompkins, a spokesman for the education department, told the New York Times that the error could have affected a small number of principals, about 30, but wasn't large enough to have a impact on the classification of anyone else — such as moving a teacher's rating from “highly effective”  to “effective.”

He told the paper that the company would repay to recalculate the scores.

“No one will be negatively impacted by A.I.R.’s error,” Tompkins said.

Joseph Spector is Gannett's Albany bureau chief.