As most education watchers know, on Sunday, the LA Times released its second round of its controversial value added teacher rankings.
This new round appears to be a more finely tuned model with more elements controlled for in trying to determine what “value” a teacher “added” to the rise or fall of a student’s test score.
Nevertheless, last month, when there was still time to head off the publication of the rankings, a group of city leaders hoped to do just that. In a letter signed by new LAUSD Superintendent John Deasy, LAUSD board president, Monica Garcia—plus Elise Buik, President & CEO Los Angeles Unified School District United Way of Greater Los Angeles (which has become active in education reform) and Gary Toebben, Pres & CEO of the LA Chamber of Commerce.
The letter (which you can access here) “urgently” requested that the Times “give serious consideration to not publicly release individual teacher “value-added” or academic growth over time (AGT) ratings.”
The Times mentioned the letter prominently in its story on Sunday’s release of the ratings, but went ahead and made the searchable database available.
Alexander Russo, whose This Week in Education column for Scholastic is always worth reading, got hold of the actual letter. (The Times declined to give it to him citing “privacy” concerns but someone from inside LAUSD forked it over without a blink.)
It wasn’t unusual that LAUSD tried to talk the Times out of posting the new Value Added scores. But the fact that the United Way and the Chamber of Commerce signed on too was interesting.
The Deasy and company letter pointed out that LAUSD’s own value added model is different than the one the Times is using, a fact that will cause confusion for teachers and parents, the letter said.
However, the letter’s main point was to say that, whichever model was used, the scores should be part of private conversations with teachers to help them improve, not placed into publicly searchable databases.
Hoping to find out why the United Way and the Chamber of Commerce had signed on to the letter, I spoke with Alicia Lara, United Way LA’s Vice President of Community Investment.
“We think the value added discussion is an important one to have,” Lara said. “The issue we have with the LA Times is outing the teachers.”
The problem with making the Times-generated rankings public, she said, is that Value Added is only one “data point” in determining teacher effectiveness. But when the Times published the scores, “it led people to believe that those scores are the only important data point in evaluating teachers. This meant that people went to the site and used it as the only source of information on teacher effectiveness, which it isn’t at all.”
Lara also called the controversy over the publication of the scores “a distraction from the larger question of of what the role that value added models should play in teacher evaluations, and how they can best be used to improve teachers’ professional practice.”
“We need to be talking about what the consequence ought to be for those teachers who don’t show improvement.”
The Times’ teacher evaluations may have gotten the discussion going, said Lara. “But is it the right discussion?”