I wasn't going to wade into the L A Times teacher brouhaha, but the responses to Liam Julian's Flypaper post yesterday have goaded me into the ring.
Among the various concerns, two emerge as the most compelling. First, there's the teacher ?outing? question; second, the value of a value-added assessment in judging teacher effectiveness.
Take the second question first.? The LAT is very explicit here:
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.
And in Los Angeles, the method can be used for only a portion of the district's roughly 14,000 elementary school instructors: California students don't take the test until second grade and teachers must have had enough students for the results to be reliable.
Seems straightforward enough ? and an accurate description of educators' tentative approach to the question of value-added evaluations.
What about the ?outing??
As a journalist for a few decades, I've had my share of gotcha moments and plenty of times have wrestled with the question of whether to publish or not.? At Life I once fielded a call from a sobbing woman ? ?I didn't know who else to give her to,? said the secretary sheepishly, after I emerged from my office, an hour later ?? begging?us not to run a?picture showing her fireman husband attempting a daring rescue of someone in raging floodwaters ? he had died in the attempt.? Another time, researching a story about the Weather Underground, I tracked down a former member of the 60s outlaw group who had been a professor at a prestigious college for 20 years (his radical background a secret from his employer) and he begged me not to give him up.*
Back to school.? Here's the telling comment from the LAT story:
Public school students are graded and tested all the time. Schools are scored too ? California rates them in an annual index.
Not so with teachers.
Nationally, the vast majority who seek tenure get it after a few years on the job, practically ensuring a position for life. After that, pay and job protections depend mostly on seniority, not performance.
Years ago, when I was just a parent, I spent weeks trying to get student suspension numbers from my school district.? It took numerous Freedom of Information Act requests and many harangues of school board members at public meetings, but I finally got the information.? And, of course, it proved what I knew it would prove: that African-American students were being tossed out of school at much higher rates than their white counterparts. Then I asked for what I considered to be the key piece of data:? the linking of suspensions to individual teachers. The board scoffed. The audience (mostly teachers) booed.? I had hit one of education's most inviolable firewalls: teacher privilege.? I never got the information and?the problem of arbitrary suspensions remains unresolved.
I don't think for a moment that value-added assessments are a complete measure of a teacher's worth.? Nor do I think that teacher quality is by any means the sole measure of a school or school district's performance.? But I do believe that teachers are public servants and need to be accountable to the public.? How their students perform is surely a worthy measure ? not the sole measure ? of their effectiveness and the public should have that information.??(It's not as if the paper?is printing addressess and phone numbers.) ?If the district is not going to provide it, then the LAT did exactly what the founders would have presumed it would do when they wrote press freedom into the Bill of Rights.? It published.
???
*We ran the picture of the fireman, but I did not out the professor
?Peter Meyer
