LAUSD, teachers negotiating use of test scores
LA Times story catalyst to talks
The Los Angeles Times’ impending plan to publish the performance rankings of 6,000 elementary school teachers, based on student test scores, has become the catalyst for sudden negotiations between Los Angeles Unified and its teachers union over teacher evaluations. One likely reason: Incorporating test scores into teachers’ personnel reviews could provide the legal basis in the future to deny releasing the scores, tied to individual teachers, to the public and to the Times.
The Times reported Sunday that United Teachers Los Angeles has accepted Deputy Superintendent John Deasy’s offer to restart talks on performance reviews of teachers. UTLA President A.J. Duffy declined to say whether that should include using test scores, although Duffy, who has flatly ruled out the use of test scores until now, is facing pressure to do so.
According to the Times, in a memo Friday to LAUSD board members, Deasy outlined the use of “value-added” analysis of student test scores, which the Times also employed, to identify teachers who need improvement. Deasy also indicated he wanted test scores to comprise up to 30 percent of a teacher’s evaluation. That’s the same proportion that LAUSD and key districts proposed in the state’s Race to the Top application that’s pending in Washington.
Deasy told the Times he hoped that negotiations could be completed before the Times publishes the scores of all third to fifth grade teachers in the district. The Times has said it plans to do so by the end of the month and has already notified individual teachers of their rankings.
If a deal between the district and UTLA can be struck within days, that raises an interesting question: Will Deasy and the LAUSD board join the union in formally asking the Times to withhold publishing teachers’ scores? And, if asked, how would the Times, which has faced mostly criticism for its plan to release the scores, respond?
LAUSD has acknowledged that it has had the ability to perform a value-added analysis of student test scores but not done so. The Times filed a public records request to obtain student test scores correlated to teachers. The district’s attorneys responded that they had to comply, because the data weren’t tied to personnel evaluations.
Value-added analysis claims to measure teacher quality by calculating the impact of teachers on student test scores, by taking into consideration factors that would affect students, including socioeconomic status and parent education. The Times used seven years of scores to create its evaluations. Value-added methods have limitations but can alert the district to consistently poor performing teachers and, together with other criteria, can provide a sounder basis for awarding pay raises than simply longevity and graduate degrees, the current method.
Last week, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, met with union and LAUSD officials. Weingarten has said she agreed with the use of test scores as one component in a teacher’s evaluation and could foresee providing parents with information about a teacher’s overall evaluation, but opposed the public release of teachers’ test scores. Deasy told the Times that a school’s report card would eventually include general information about the staff’s value-added test scores.
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Too much emphasis can be placed on using test performance to measure teacher effectiveness. This has forced teachers in other states to use a more narrow-minded, one-dimensional ‘teach to the test’ approach.
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The LA Times has been publishing a series of articles on teacher effectiveness using a scheme known as “value added” to measures and evaluate teachers in the LA Unified School District. The LA Times should be given the benefit of the doubt and it should be assumed their intentions are good. But, Oh Lord! Please don’t let them be misunderstood.
Here are a few reasons why the Times report should not be taken too seriously:
1. It is based on data from LAUSD computers! These are the same guys who for months could not get their payroll right. No right minded person would accept anything from LAUSD computers as accurate.
2. Measuring learning and teaching is extremely difficult to do. Good teaching is an art, not a science. It is tough to measure and is in the eye of the beholder. The value added system bases everything solely on state test results. No other measures are used.
3. The LA Times erroneously states an effective teacher is the single most important factor in learning. Making learning happen is similar to cooking. One must add all of the right ingredients before you have a cake. A good teacher is only one of the ingredients. Others are a willing learner, a safe and adequate environment, supportive administration and quality educational support personnel. Supportive parents and community help are great ingredients to include.
4. The Times report assigns the failure of student test scores solely to teachers. School boards, administration, and others “get a free pass”.
5. There is already too much emphasis on teaching to the test. Reports like this will make it worse.
6. Simple solutions do not solve complex problems. Using value added measurement and publishing the results in newspapers will not solve problems. It will cause more and/or different problems.
7. The LA Times articles miss the point. They infer if we simply “get rid” of those “bad teachers”…. A better system of evaluation is needed. This is not it. A better system requires more visits to teachers’ classrooms, not simply a visit to the news stand.
8. School districts do not invest a great deal of resources in quality control. This needs to be corrected. The LA Times would be more constructive if they exposed the small amount of resources used for professional development, evaluation, and remediation.
Stephen P. Blum, Esq.
Ventura Unified Education Association President,
Ventura County Community College District Trustee
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My 19-year-old’s comment on the L.A. Times assault on teachers: “You mean they published teachers’ pictures and said ‘this is a sh*tty teacher’? That’s the kind of courageous, boundary-crossing journalism that will save newspapers from the Internet.”
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