The Los Angeles Times newspaper has launched itself into the education reform debate by printing a series of articles where they propose a radical new system for teacher evaluations. The series has sparked tremendous controversy, and the use of student test scores as an evaluation tool for teacher quality is the epicenter of the debate.
The Times believes that there should be a ranking system based on a mathematical formula called “value added” for both teachers and schools. This is how The Times defines “value added”:
“Value-added estimates the effectiveness of a teacher by looking at the test scores of his students. Each student’s past test performance is used to project his 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.”
The Times has even gone so far as to take test score data for Los Angeles Unified School District students (which is public record) and apply the formula to rank LAUSD teachers and schools on their website. The Times is critical of the fact that LAUSD has done little with the data up until now. Currently, test scores are a used for doing school evaluations, but are not taken very seriously unless the overall scores for the school are excessively low. Scores are not used in teacher evaluations at all.
The use of test scores playing more of a role in evaluations may have been changing soon anyway, even if The Times hadn’t gotten on the bandwagon. LAUSD’s Board of Education just (more…)
