Student test score data proposed to evaluate L.A. teachers

[n2doc]

School district task force also suggests giving more money to high-performing teachers and waiting up to four years before granting tenure. The teachers union strongly opposes evaluation reforms.

By Jason Song, Los Angeles Times
April 28, 2010

Teachers union officials strongly opposed recommendations made to the Los Angeles school board Tuesday that call for using student test score data to evaluate instructors.

The suggestions came from a task force comprising Los Angeles Unified School District administrators, principals, teachers and union leaders that was created shortly before The Times published a series of articles last May examining the difficulties in firing and evaluating teachers.

The task force made several proposals, including giving more money to high-performing teachers willing to work in hard-to-staff schools, waiting up to four years before granting tenure to teachers and requiring principals and local superintendents to vouch for an instructor before they receive tenure, and revamping the evaluation process to include student test scores and parent and teacher feedback.

Politicians including President Obama and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger have advocated using students' standardized test performance to help determine teachers' effectiveness. State Board of Education President Ted Mitchell, who headed the district's task force, goes further, suggesting that value-added analysis — which uses several years of test scores to determine teacher quality — should eventually make up at least half of a teacher's evaluation.

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http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0428-teachers-20100428,0,3184659.story

[tonysam]

1. Another damned disaster.

This is all about deskilling the teaching profession.

[zazen]

2. in NC they're tracking students' test scores all the way to their teachers' college professors

I kid you not. There's a new model afloat that enables the assessment of teacher preparation programs by student EOG and EOC scores. The researchers claim they've controlled for dozens of other variables and have drilled down to the influence of that specific teacher on that specific set of students. Then, all the teachers who've graduated from a particular program have their scores aggregated.

It's one useful lens, perhaps . . they demonstrated, eg, that teachers graduating from one college of education (within one of NC's public universities) in particular seemed to actually have a negative influence on students' performance in science, for ex, independent of SES of students, of district, of prior achievement, etc. Other findings show increased "performance" in particular areas by cohorts of graduates of other universities. The teacher prep programs are then being evaluated in terms of how well the faculty are preparing the students.

[tonysam]

3. What the privatizers want to do is get rid of colleges of education

They've been demeaning them for years, simply because these colleges prepare teachers as professionals, and this is a sin to the privatizers. The privatizers want to get rid of teaching as a profession so that any fool on the street can do the job with scripted curriculum.

[n2doc]

4. Or, more to the point, anyone from any country can "do the job"

As this makes it simple to bring in people from the Philippines and other countries at minimum wages to teach "since Americans won't do that job".

[tonysam]

5. They won't even need to import the teachers

Eventually all schools will be distance learning in parts of the world where computers can be used; the rest will have teachers barely more educated than the students they teach.

It's all because the World Bank considers education a waste of money.