As students and teachers returned to school on Monday after the publication of performance ratings  for 18,000 teachers, many parents said they were giving the reports serious thought. Yet there was an equal measure of skepticism among parents that test scores have any relationship with teachers' competence. Some said they already knew how good a teacher was by walking into the classroom or by monitoring their children's progress. "I'm the kind of person who likes to see for themselves," a father in Queens said. Others worried about how their fellow parents, perhaps ones  _ , might respond. Will they demand a new teacher? Move their children to a new school? Elizabeth Sane, the mother of a fourth grader at the Ella Baker School, a kindergarten-through-eighth-grade school on the Upper East Side, said that her daughter was switched to a different teacher's class over the summer, and that it was "like adding salt to the wound" when she saw the high ratings for her daughter's previous teacher. Her daughter's teacher this year did not receive a rating because he previously taught high school. Ms. Sane said that the rating was not the only factor that influenced how she assessed a teacher's performance, but that the data used for teacher evaluations mattered. But other parents dropping their children off at the Ella Baker School said they did not trust teacher ratings based on test scores any more than they wanted their children's learning measured only by the state exams. "Some people take it as the final word, but it doesn't change who they are as teachers. The ratings aren't accurate, and the whole student testing thing needs to be thrown out," said Lydia Delgado, whose child is in the second grade. The attitude of the author towards the way to assess teachers' competence is  _  .
supportive critical indifferent objective