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Hoping the Bad Teacher Problem Will Just Go Away (It Won’t)
Most parents realize how important it is for their kids to have a good teacher, although they may not be aware just how important it is (the difference between the achievement of students with a teacher in the top 10% and the achievement of students with a teacher in the bottom 10% can be as much as 25 percentile points - in just one year). Despite this, school boards and teachers' unions generally do their best to keep teacher effectiveness a deep, dark secret - insisting that teachers be paid on the basis of their experience, education. and training, even though these factors have little or no bearing on teacher effectiveness.
Now the Los Angeles Times has blown the roof off this cosy arrangement. Using Freedom of Information to obtain seven years' worth of student achievement data linked to their Los Angeles Unified School Board classroom teachers, the newspaper sent the information to RAND Corporation (Research AND Development), an independent non-profit organization that aids decision-making by providing research and analysis, asking that the data be used to calculate the value-added service of individual teachers. And then the paper published all of the results!
Although the school board has had these data for years and totally ignored them, things are going to have to change. Now their phones are going to start ringing off the hook with calls from parents whose kid has been assigned to Mr. Lemon's class - and the school board is going to be forced to come up with a different game plan. It will be interesting to see whether the new plan involves firing some of their worst performers.
These data are widely available in the US, and it won't be long before other newspapers publish information about the effectiveness of teachers in their region. The situation is different in Canada, however, where we have very little good information on student achievement and no ability to link it to individual teachers. It seems that Canadian educators will be allowed to continue indefinitely with the fiction that teachers are all equally effective - to the detriment of students, of course.