LA Times Ranks Teachers On — What Else? — Student Test Scores

And the crusade goes on: How many ways can the public education establishment prioritize a teacher's students' standardized test scores above all else? This time, the  Los Angeles Times will broadcast individual LAUSD teachers' student test-score data over the past seven years, using a statistical technique called "value-added analysis" to rate teachers according to their students' progress over time.

According to some, this is a good thing, because it means bad teachers will be shamed into competing for their jobs.

Here's something from the above link that makes my blood boil: "Unfortunately, we have little idea how to train good teachers. The best we may be able to do is to throw a bunch of people into the classroom and measure what happens but for that strategy to work it needs to be followed up with firings."

Firings? I expected that sentence to end with, oh, I don't know, "better training." Is that so strange?

Yes, schools need to evaluate teachers, as all employers evaluate employees. Yes, teacher effectiveness is by far one of the most important factors when it comes to student achievement. But the widely accepted definitions of "teacher effectiveness" and "student achievement" are hardly what I'd call "effective," or "achievement" — they're too one-sided. Test scores should be one aspect of these measurements — definitely. But this constant be-all, end-all of public education's evaluation? This constant assertion that public schools' shortcomings have everything to do with these "bad teachers" and that the across-the-board answer is, of course, to fire them — do away with tenure and fire 80 percent of the teaching staff at a given school?

Why is the answer not, "train them"? Why can't there be a better investment in teacher training and support, rather than an ongoing investment in the concept of standardized tests, student performance on these tests, and the relationship between teachers and their students' performance on these tests?

It's better than nothing, of course, that these rankings posted in the Los Angeles Times are being created according to a student's performance over time, rather than comparing student test scores to other student test scores (which must correct for some discrepancies in home life, income levels, prior learning and so forth). But some, like Dr. Stephen Krashen, a professor emeritus at the University of Southern California, maintain that the Times is "practicing educational research without a license" and if we continually associate teacher effectiveness with effective test preparation, we're doomed.

Writes Krashen, "Teachers who prepare students for higher scores on such tests are not teaching. They are simply drilling students with information that will soon be forgotten." Hear, hear.

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