Grading Teachers Gets An A+

Makes sense to me.  And apparently it is starting to make sense on the West Coast.  In Los Angeles Unified School District, some 6000 teachers were recently graded on their performance.  Most importantly, these performance indicators were made public so that parents understand if the teacher is qualified to teach.

The Los Angeles Times writes:

On Sunday, The Times made public a database that assigned “value added” ratings to some 6,000 Los Angeles Unified School District teachers. Rankings from “least effective” to “most effective” were assigned to teachers based on an analysis of whether they consistently raised or lowered their students’ scores on standardized tests. Teachers were allowed to review their scores in advance and post comments if they wished to. Some were outraged at the idea of publicly releasing the data. Others welcomed the feedback. And still others questioned how a single measure could provide accurate information about a teacher’s competency, and worried that teachers would become much more test-focused in their teaching. We have excerpted some teachers’ comments below. Their full comments and those of other teachers can be found on our searchable database at projects.latimes.com/value-added

Los Angeles is not alone.  The New York Timeswrites on how a formula to grade teachers is building support (and criticism) across the country.

A growing number of school districts have adopted a system called value-added modeling to answer that question, provoking battles from Washington to Los Angeles — with some saying it is an effective method for increasing teacher accountability, and others arguing that it can give an inaccurate picture of teachers’ work.

The system calculates the value teachers add to their students’ achievement, based on changes in test scores from year to year and how the students perform compared with others in their grade.

People who analyze the data, making a few statistical assumptions, can produce a list ranking teachers from best to worst.

Use of value-added modeling is exploding nationwide. Hundreds of school systems, including those in Chicago, New York and Washington, are already using it to measure the performance of schools or teachers. Many more are expected to join them, partly because the Obama administration has prodded states and districts to develop more effective teacher-evaluation systems than traditional classroom observation by administrators.

Chalk one up for the parents!

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