L.A. teacher reviews should include student achievement, judge says
Source: LA Times
In a tentative ruling that could potentially transform California teacher evaluations, a Los Angeles judge ordered the L.A. Unified School District to use student academic progress in reviewing instructors.
L.A. County Superior Court Judge James C. Chalfant upheld claims by a group of parents that the district was violating a 40-year-old state law, known as the Stull Act, which requires that teacher evaluations include measures of how well pupils are learning what the state expects them to know each year. The law was amended in 1999 to specifically require the use of state standardized test scores to measure student progress.
But Chalfant did not order the district to use student test scores in evaluations. Which specific measures are used, how they are incorporated into performance reviews, how the different elements are weighted and how administrators are trained in using student performance measures may well be a matter subject to collective bargaining, he wrote.
The ruling, while tentative, lends significant legal clout to a growing movement to use student test scores as part of a teachers performance review. Several states have begun incorporating them into teacher reviews and the Obama administration is also pushing school districts to use them.
Read more: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/06/la-teacher-reviews-should-include-student-achievement-judge-says.html
Rosa Luxemburg
(28,627 posts)joeglow3
(6,228 posts)Yes, there are exceptions to every rule.
Yes, there is no panacea.
However, many things (when dealing with comparisons across MILLIONS of people) are easily evaluated.
For instance, math problems are easy to put on a standardized test to evaluate someone's grasp of concepts.
And just so it is not lost on anyone: there is NO solution that will work in 100% of scenarios.
eppur_se_muova
(36,261 posts)That's unexpected.
msongs
(67,395 posts)all or most of the kids in the teacher's class are failing. For my middle school algebra class nearly all the kids flunked. When they gave us a different teacher, nearly all of us passed. It wasn't algebra that killed the beast lol