Value-Added Stats revealed in LA

There’s an interesting battle taking place in Los Angeles that centres on using value-added statistics to evaluate teacher performance. The LA Times, despite pleas from the school board and others, has released the figures and that’s truly sad, but not for the reasons (such as the unfortunate invasion of individual teacher privacy) that the opponents of this move are stating.

If the LA public school system was working in the best interest of the students, these types of statistics would be gathered annually and disseminated to school principals. That way teachers under-performing, but still retrievable, could be given the help they need, while those found irretrievably incompetent could be removed from the teaching profession.

However, no one in Los Angeles, (or Toronto, or Winnipeg, or Vancouver for that matter) believes that either of these things is being done or can be done in an environment where the board staff and teacher unions are hostile to any objective measures of student – and by extension – teacher performance.

That in turn forces the LA Times to do the right thing which is to provide the numbers to the public so they can see for themselves the incredible variability in learning outcomes that can’t be explained away by the socioeconomic excuses so dear to virtually all public school systems. As the article points out:

“But there were often large disparities among instructors who taught similar students in similar schools — even within the same schools. The differences among teachers were more than three times as great as those among schools.”

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