The Los Angeles Times has produced a controversial series of articles called “Grading the Teachers” in the past few weeks. Here is a brief summary from the Times on their position.
“The Los Angeles Times has produced an analysis of how effective Los Angeles Unified School District teachers have been at improving their students' performance on standardized tests. The Times has decided to make the ratings available because they bear on the performance of public employees who provide an important service, and in the belief that parents and the public have a right to the information.”
What is value-added analysis?
Value-added estimates the effectiveness of a teacher by looking at the test scores of their students. Each student's past test performance is used to project their performance in the future. The difference between the child's actual and projected results is the estimated "value" that the teacher added or subtracted during the year. The teacher's rating reflects his average results after teaching a statistically reliable number of students.
There is a dedicated area on their website with all of the information published in the last few weeks. You can access it by clicking here.
There is a tremendous amount of information on the website and it is going to take a few posts to get through all of it, so let’s start with a few basics.
- In our society, everyone has their performance evaluated. No matter what it is, we want to measure it. From politics to sports to entertainment and even religion we want to know who wins, who loses, who is successful and who isn’t.
- There is nothing wrong with evaluating performance. Most people would agree, as long as they know what is expected of them and that they would be evaluated objectively, they are ok with it.
- Many times people disagree on what should be measured, how and by whom. Some things can be non-negotiable (for example, airline pilots have to have a 100% success rate in landing their planes safely). Getting people to agree involves compromises when it comes to controversial items and even then you may not always get exactly what you want.
- People have different definitions of what it means to be “successful”. Many people live in a “pass/fail” world and they are only interested in knowing if they cleared the bar. Degrees of success don’t really matter to them. Others desperately what to know exactly where they stand compared to their competition. They are not satisfied knowing that they cleared the bar, they want to know by how much, and how does that rank compared to others.
- Performance evaluations are generally considered confidential. There are a few exceptions, but for the most part, discussions on performance are held between an employee and their direct supervisor.
- At the end of the day, everyone wants to successful in whatever it is that they do.
So, those are the basics (according to me anyway) we’ll get into some more details later……
