SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

How Good Will My Kid’s Teacher Be?

As you send your child off to start a new school year today, you may be pondering that very question. This New York Times Magazine article on teacher accountability looks at new ways that teacher accountability is going to be measured and reported on in Los Angeles. What was once a guessing game and schoolyard gossip is now going to undergo unprecedented scrutiny and a sort of “Consumer Reports” analysis of schools and teachers is being undertaken:

“A few months ago, a team of reporters at The Los Angeles Times and an education economist set out to create precisely such a consumer guide to education in Los Angeles. The reporters requested and received seven years of students’ English and math elementary-school test scores from the school district. The economist then used a statistical technique called value-added analysis to see how much progress students had made, from one year to the next, under different third- through fifth-grade teachers. The variation was striking. Under some of the roughly 6,000 teachers, students made great strides year after year. Under others, often at the same school, students did not. The newspaper named a few teachers - both stars and laggards - and announced that it would release the approximate rankings for all teachers, along with their names.

“The articles have caused an electric reaction. The president of the Los Angeles teachers union called for a boycott of the newspaper. But the union has also suggested it is willing to discuss whether such scores can become part of teachers’ official evaluations. Meanwhile, more than 1,700 teachers have privately reviewed their scores online, and hundreds have left comments that will accompany them.”

Electric reaction is probably an understatement! Can readers imagine what a similar report in Canada would lead to? (Can you say Days of Action?)

“One way to think about the Los Angeles case is as an understandable overreaction to an unacceptable status quo. For years, school administrators and union leaders have defeated almost any attempt at teacher measurement, partly by pointing to the limitations. Lately, though, the politics of education have changed. Parents know how much teachers matter and know that, just as with musicians or athletes or carpenters or money managers, some teachers are a lot better than others.”

So it will be interesting to see, in these times of scarce public funding and declining enrolments, has the politics of education really changed?