Where newspaper goes in rating teachers, others soon will follow

[Guest guest]

Where newspaper goes in rating teachers, others soon will follow

Nation's schools struggle to distinguish which educators are more effective

Aug. 22, 2010

So you want to know if the teacher your child has for the new school year is the

star you're hoping for. How do you find out?

Well, you can ask around. Often even grade school kids will give you the word.

But what you hear informally might be on the mark and might be baloney. Isn't

there some way to get a good answer?

Um, not really. You want a handle on how your kid is doing, there's plenty of

data. You want information on students in the school or the school district, no

problem.

But teachers? If they had meaningful evaluation reports, the reports would be

confidential. And you can be quite confident they don't have evaluations like

that - across the U.S., and certainly in Wisconsin, the large majority of

teachers get superficial and almost always favorable evaluations based on brief

visits by an administrator to their classrooms, research shows. The evaluations

are of almost no use in actually guiding teachers to improve.

Perhaps you could move to Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Times began running a

project last Sunday on teachers and the progress students made while in their

classes. It named a few names and said it will unveil in coming weeks specific

data on thousands of teachers.

The Times obtained and analyzed seven years of test scores for pretty much every

student in Los Angeles, broken down by teacher, and came up with " value-added "

results that determined how students' performance on standardized tests changed

from year to year in core subjects such as reading and math. The results showed

some teachers were leading their students to far more progress than others,

often in the same school.

The newspaper electrified the education world, with commentary flowing from

coast to coast. Much of the reaction was negative, not only from teachers (the

L.A. union president called for boycotting the newspaper) but from testing

experts who questioned whether the data the newspaper developed was fair.

But the thing that is really amazing about the newspaper's work is that it is so

much in line with what is being developed all across the country. Only two

things were really different about what the L.A. Times did: It is unprecedented

for a news organization to do this. And the paper is making the results

available to the public, which so far - but maybe not forever - is rare.

Hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal government, other levels of

government, and foundations are being used to try to create systems for fair,

reasonable and reliable use of student results as a factor in improving

teaching.

Some, primarily teachers, say it can't be done, especially if such data is tied

to pay or keeping a job. Indeed, there are a lot of difficult questions that are

unanswered, and the overall results of experiments to date have not been

sweeping.

But the turf is changing rapidly, and even teachers union leaders in some places

are joining in developing plans for factoring student success into teachers'

evaluations and pay.

For better or worse, Wisconsin is not in the forefront of the issue. Last

summer, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said a state law that banned the

use of student data in evaluating teachers was " simply ridiculous. " The law was

changed by the Legislature, but it was replaced by language that, at most, will

launch slow, careful efforts to see what can be done and not the intense,

accelerated efforts under way elsewhere.

Maybe it's ironic, then, that some of the cutting edge work is being done by a

group called the Value-Added Research Center at the University of

Wisconsin-Madison.

Thorn, associate director of the center, said that the center is

working with the Tampa school district to develop a value added system where

teachers' ratings will be public records. The center's work is being funded

under a $100 million, seven-year Gates grant. The center is also working with

districts such as New York and Chicago.

Thorn said he didn't think the total contribution of a teacher to a student

could be summed up in a number. But if there is data over a period of years that

consistently shows that students make - or don't make - significant progress

under a teacher, that has validity.

Forward-looking school leaders, Thorn said, know the " 1880s model " still in use

for evaluating teachers is not the way to move things forward. They want " every

teacher to be a rock star, " and progress data can be a key to doing that.

" As for kids, we owe them a lot of growth, " Thorn said. " We owe them highly

productive teachers. "

Union leaders in Wisconsin are handling the subject cautiously but acknowledge

change is coming, possibly including the use of student progress data as a

factor in teacher evaluations. That's much different than use in decisions on

pay or employment.

Bell, president of the Wisconsin Education Association Council, cautioned

people not to get bowled over by data.

" There are all kinds of things that aren't measured that are really important, "

she said. Data can provide " an incomplete picture - yet it sounds so

scientific. "

Mike Langyel, president of the Milwaukee Teachers' Education Association, said

he is optimistic that the Milwaukee Public Schools and union leaders will agree

on a more effective system for evaluating teachers within a year. Value added

data might be part of it, he said, but the union wants " much richer indicators

of how teachers are doing, " such as evaluations based on classroom observations

by supervisors or other teachers.

Will the day come when parents will be able to get reports on teachers' rates of

success? It's a largely unexplored issue so far, but data has a way of

spreading, and the data is being developed. Just look at the L.A. Times. Just

look at what's going on across the nation.

Alan J. Borsuk is senior fellow in law and public policy at Marquette University

Law School. He can be reached at alan.borsuk@....