A Firestorm Over Teacher Ratings in New York "Shame Is Not the Solution," by Bill Gates (Op-Ed, Feb. 23), couldn't come at a more appropriate time. His words echo the ideas of many New York City teachers: releasing data reports to publicly shame low performers can cause nothing but further damage to an already fragile system. Highly effective educators should be praised for their accomplishments, but humiliating ineffective and developing teachers cannot succeed in raising their performance. As a master teacher in a low-performing school in New York, I know that a little praise can go a long way in inspiring otherwise demoralized professionals. Publicly flogging our developing teachers will do nothing but further their animosity toward the system. Teachers are much more likely to improve when they feel as if they are valued and appreciated. And until we are delivered a magically endless supply of amazing teachers, we must work with what we have. We need to do our best to harness teacher talent, not stifle it. While I applaud Bill Gates for working to improve teacher evaluation systems and appreciate his acknowledgment of the serious commitment required for reform, he doesn't mention the ticking clock. While he valiantly works to create intelligent, coherent teacher evaluation systems, kids (from mostly underserved populations) sit in classrooms with teachers of unknown quality. A test score isn't everything, but it is one piece of information immediately available to parents. Until we can describe and measure what a highly effective teacher is, parents deserve access to the information. The writer is a middle school science teacher in a program improvement school. Bill Gates is right: ranking teachers based on "value added" measures will do nothing to improve educational quality. But the problems with making high-stakes judgments from test data go beyond their misuse to "shame" teachers. As Mr. Gates correctly notes, test scores alone are not accurate enough to assess teaching or learning. More important, they provide little useful information to diagnose the real causes of educational problems. Nor do they provide meaningful guidance to help improve school quality, as the failure of the No Child Left Behind law demonstrates. Just as at Microsoft, reliable evaluation requires the use of multiple measures. Employees - like students and teachers - can demonstrate excellence in different ways. To assess and improve education, neither New York nor the country should rely primarily on test scores or on any other single source of evidence. ROBERT A. SCHAEFFER Public Education Director Natl. Center for Fair and Open TestingSanibel, Fla., Feb. 23, 2012 Bill Gates objects to the public release of teachers" student test scores and compares the personnel policies of the public schools with Microsoft's. But he overlooks a significant difference: the schools" "customers" are a captive audience who have no choice whatsoever regarding their teachers as compared with Microsoft's customers, who can take their business elsewhere. Shouldn't parents have the right to know the track record of their child's teacher? That said, any release of a teacher's student test results must be compared with other teachers" results for comparable student populations and be of a multiyear nature, recognizing that things often happen in any given year, either to the teacher or to his or her class. The writer is a retired superintendent for the Valley Stream (N.Y.) Central High School District. After each New York teacher's performance is assessed, I propose that each wear a scarlet letter proclaiming how he or she performed: A for "awful," B for "bad," C for "can't cut it," D for "dreadful" and E for "exceptional." If this sounds ridiculous, that's because it is. Once these teacher "grades" are made public, you can imagine the havoc that will ensue when parents find out that their child is assigned to one of the less than stellar teachers. It never ceases to amaze me how people who have not spent a single day working in a school can claim to be such experts in how they should be run.