In a major front-page story on Sunday, the Los Angeles Times rated teachers based on student test scores they'd obtained from the LAUSD:
Seeking to shed light on the problem, The Times obtained seven years of math and English test scores from the Los Angeles Unified School District and used the information to estimate the effectiveness of L.A. teachers - something the district could do but has not.
The Times used a statistical approach known as value-added analysis, which rates teachers based on their students' progress on standardized tests from year to year. Each student's performance is compared with his or her own in past years, which largely controls for outside influences often blamed for academic failure: poverty, prior learning and other factors.
Though controversial among teachers and others, the method has been increasingly embraced by education leaders and policymakers across the country, including the Obama administration.
Although the Times article later acknowledges the limitations of this method, they still plowed right ahead and are using it - with the names of actual LAUSD teachers - to evaluate teachers in a massively public way:
No one suggests using value-added analysis as the sole measure of a teacher. Many experts recommend that it count for half or less of a teacher's overall evaluation....
Nevertheless, value-added analysis offers the closest thing available to an objective assessment of teachers. And it might help in resolving the greater mystery of what makes for effective teaching, and whether such skills can be taught.
As most of you know, I was a teacher myself, teaching history and political science at the University of Washington and at Monterey Peninsula College from 2002 to 2009. I love teaching and hope to do more of it someday. I also taught a graduate seminar on pedagogy (the study of teaching), where we extensively examined the literature on student testing and teacher evaluation.
In both my experience as a teacher and my review of the literature on the topic, it is extremely clear that it is a very bad idea, highly likely to produce misleading results, to rely solely on test scores to evaluate either student learning or teacher effectiveness. Testing is very useful, but it is NOT the only way to evaluate a teacher.
That in turn is a primary reason why you haven't seen districts like LAUSD publish this information. They and teachers alike prefer to conduct more holistic reviews that don't reduce teaching to test scores. And that's why UTLA is slamming the LA Times article:
One of the biggest critics is the L.A. teachers union. The head of the union said Sunday he was organizing a "massive boycott" of The Times after the newspaper began publishing a series of articles that uses student test scores to estimate the effectiveness of district teachers.
"You're leading people in a dangerous direction, making it seem like you can judge the quality of a teacher by ... a test," said A.J. Duffy, president of United Teachers Los Angeles, which has more than 40,000 members.
Why would it be a "dangerous" direction? Because by naming teachers and providing a flawed ratings system for those teachers, it gives the public a deeply misleading view of teacher effectiveness. And it can undermine public support for teachers as a result.
The LA Times would have done better to not take into its own hands the making of education policy for the LAUSD. That's a matter more appropriately done by parents, teachers, and the school district, in collaboration with each other. So I share the UTLA's concerns with how this analysis is unfolding and proceeding. |
