Union Boycotts LA Times Over Teacher Evaluation Disclosure 629
Atypical Geek writes "According to Newsweek, the local teachers union is infuriated over the disclosure of teacher performance metrics. Quoting: 'Do parents have the right to know which of their kids' teachers are the most and least effective? That's the controversy roaring in California this week with the publication of an investigative series by the Los Angeles Times's Jason Song and Jason Felch, who used seven years of math and English test data to publicly identify the best and the worst third- to fifth-grade teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The newspaper's announcement of its plans to release data later this month on all 6,000 of the city's elementary-school teachers has prompted the local teachers' union to rally members to organize a boycott of the newspaper.' According to the linked Times article, United Teachers Los Angeles president A.J. Duffy said the database was 'an irresponsible, offensive intrusion into your professional life that will do nothing to improve student learning.'"
Re:Educational Problems (Score:3, Informative)
A good thing (Score:1, Informative)
These unions need to stop whining and get on with something productive. I can tell whether a teacher has tenure after a brief conversation. It's so obvious in their attitude, it's like once they get tenure and know they can't be fired (unless they screw up really bad) it's like someone flipped the 'give a damn' switch to off.
As for the rankings, it's not conclusive but there surely is some correlation. I'd like to know simply because I subsidize these schools and pay the teacher's salaries (which are rather high in most cases). I deserve to know what the money forcibly taken from me to pay for things I do not use or condone is doing.
Depends who you thnk teachers work for (Score:5, Informative)
It would be nice to hope that this was the first step in recognising that (indirectly) real people pay for and therefore employ teachers. These real people would like to think the primary role of teachers is to impart knowledge, skills and abilities to the children in their charge. If this article leads parents to question schools about why they are employing sub-standard teachers, then it can only be a good thing, that should be extended everywhere.
Re:like any other job? (Score:1, Informative)
Yes, this ranking is a good one (Score:4, Informative)
This comparison is particularly useful because it tracks students over time so that the effect of a teacher can be separated from other preexisting conditions (like poverty). This [latimes.com] graphic from the LA times really says it all. The image shows how on teacher greatly improves the standing of students in his class, while the other does the exact opposite. This ranking has merit.
Re:like any other job? (Score:4, Informative)
The original LA Times article on the web did have a prominently placed solicitation for teachers to submit their comments on their score. Not sure what the plans for the dead tree edition were
It also seems to me that the teachers' side of the story was printed:
Many teachers and union leaders are skeptical of the value-added approach, saying standardized tests are flawed and do not capture the more intangible benefits of good instruction. Some also fear teachers will be fired based on the arcane calculations of statisticians who have never worked in a classroom.
Whether you buy their arguments or not, the teachers' official point of view has been spelled out for the Times' readers.
I for one don't buy it. Certainly care needs to be taken with designing any evaluations of job effectiveness. The value-added approach tries to take such care. The union response was just the standard line that you cannot and should not evaluate them by standardized tests that would let you compare them against each other. And similarly disappointing rhetoric implying that only teachers can evaluate teacher effectiveness - as if mere mortals like parents or statisticians have no insight. You don't need to be a master chef to know whether the food was prepared by one, and you don't need to be a teacher to know whether a teachers's students are learning.
Re:RTFA before commenting (Score:4, Informative)
Didn't catch this quote earlier but it invalidates point 1,2.
Re:Educational Problems (Score:5, Informative)
Should it be illegal for cartels to set commodity prices?
That is illegal; there's a reason OPEC meetings aren't held in New York, and that LCD makers were fined for collusion (like here [nytimes.com]; that's from 2008, or here [wsj.com], for the new suit by the state of New York)
It's amazing how free market purists suddenly don't trust the free market when it comes to workers' pay.
I'm not aware of any "free market purists" who think cartels are a good thing. After all, teachers aren't barely-literate manual laborers; they have college degrees - shouldn't they be able to negotiate a salary on their own? If there were a market in teacher pay, for example, I'm reasonably certain that a high school physics teacher would make a lot more than a kindergarten teacher. Instead, in most public systems, pay is determined by seniority and box-checking. (Got a master's degree? Check. Gone to summer course X? Check. Collect for each box checked.)
Whole story. (Score:4, Informative)
My mother was a book-keeper for a school district and as a result was able to get the same benefits as the teachers. She has absolutely no problems with money in her retirement, now and she isn't exactly a frugal person to put it lightly.
In my financial planning class, we were shown stats that showed that teachers are the tops when it comes to people who retire as millionaires.
If you start teaching at the age of 22 right out of college and stick with it for 30 years (retire at 52), you'll be set for life - nice comfortable life. The first couple of years suck in terms of apy, though. But after you get over that hump, you're making a nice living. Looking back now, I kind of wish I did that.
Either your mother is in a very shitty school district, or you're not telling us the whole story.
Re:Teacher Evaluations (Score:1, Informative)
I know it's a lot to ask to suggest you read the article before sharing your opinion on the topic at hand, but this was one where we're talking about something new that not many are familiar with. Teachers were not being compared based on the actual test scores of their students, rather the students were followed from year to year and their percentile rankings were compared from year to year.
Perhaps a concrete example would help, say you own Walmart, and need to compare how your stores are doing. Would you compare absolute dollar amounts? While of interest you wouldn't use that to compare how well your employees are doing in all your stores, because some markets just have more affluent or more customers available. A store in a tony Chicago suburb is always going to earn more money that a store in rural Montana. Rather you'd probably do what stores actually do, compare year on year sales within each store. Stores that stay the same increase sales probably have employees that are doing ok. But stores that consistently do worse each year are likely to have problems that need to be addressed.
That's what value-added statistics do for teacher performance, they look at whether individual students do worse, the same, or better as they move from teacher to teacher (year to year). If a teacher consistently takes students that are performing at a given level, and their performance drops rather than improves or stays the same, how can you really argue that the teacher has nothing, indeed cannot have anything, to do with it?
Especially when this happens in classes where students are assigned pretty much randomly to one teacher or another within the same school?
Just because some statistics might not be good to use, doesn't mean no statistics are useful.
Re:Since when is a teacher solely responsible (Score:4, Informative)
I know this is Slashdot and all... Could you be bothered to even slightly learn anything about the source's methods?
The study tracks scores from year to year... And it shows that there are certain teachers who consistently bring scores down, and other teachers who consistently bring scores up. Since students are assigned practically randomly, if it was all down to how hard the students tried we wouldn't see that.
Re:Likely major fail with approach... (Score:2, Informative)
However, having had many protracted discussions with friends of mine who are teachers, I've found out that in many districts the principals identify the best teachers in the school themselves and assign the worst students to them. The "sampling" of sorts is most likely very unrandom and biased.
I'm certain this isn't captured in these test scores or being adjusted for. This would be difficult if not impossible to tease out but might be by looking for the expected patterns, i.e. a student's poor performance is less than it was with a previous teacher.
If you had RTFA you would have known that this is accounted for. The metric looks at a student's relative performance. A bad student, given an average teacher, will do just as poorly at the end of the year as at the start. Ditto for a good student, an average student, a corpse, a bird, a principal.
Re:Educational Problems (Score:3, Informative)
The main law is the National Labor Relations Act. It spells out what employers and unions can and can't do. The company I work for is a non-union shop and is talks to be bought be a union shop so flyers about unions are all over the place.
Comment removed (Score:2, Informative)
Re:like any other job? (Score:3, Informative)
My feeling is that we don't need a perfect comparison function. We don't need the kind of precision
As long as student test scores are the only measured criteria then those results will be treated as if they had perfect precision. Its the standard "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" problem. Additionally it doesn't account for problems like "teaching to the test." As the article itself says, "Many experts recommend that it count for half or less of a teacher's overall evaluation."