LA Teachers: Good Teaching Takes More than Bubble Sheets

[Omaha Steve]

http://labornotes.org/2010/09/la-teachers-good-teaching-takes-more-bubble-sheets

Mary Rose O'Leary | September 16, 2010

As a handful of Los Angeles Times employees watched from a balcony, hundreds of teachers hit the pavement below in our signature red union shirts, marching and chanting Tuesday afternoon in front of the Times building downtown.

Members of United Teachers Los Angeles turned out on the second day of a busy back-to-school week to voice our outrage at the public flogging the Times had rendered to scores of dedicated LA teachers. The Times published a front-page series rating individual teachers on a discredited “teacher effectiveness” scale that scores each teacher based solely on his or her students’ progress on the state test given each May.

This “Valued Added Model” (VAM), currently popular among education “reformers,” purports to be an objective measure of teacher effectiveness with its market approach to education. But the model is deeply flawed.

In its report analyzing the validity of using test scores to evaluate teachers, the Economic Policy Institute states:

VAM estimates have proven to be unstable across statistical models, years, and classes that teachers teach. One study found that across five large urban districts, among teachers who were ranked in the top 20% of effectiveness in the first year, fewer than a third were in that top group the next year, and another third moved all the way down to the bottom 40%... The same dramatic fluctuations were found for teachers ranked at the bottom in the first year of analysis.

FULL story at link.

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[DrDan]

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