L.A. schools Supt. John Deasy announced Friday that 30% of a teacher’s evaluation will be based on student standardized test scores, setting off another round of contention in the nation’s second-largest school system just weeks before a critical school board election.
Leaders of the teachers union have insisted that there should be no fixed percentage for how much student test scores should count in evaluations — and that test results should serve almost entirely as a guide toward improving instruction.
Teachers’ unions have long preferred that their members be evaluated by…ok, I’m kidding, they’d prefer no serious set of evaluation criteria whatsoever. It’s interesting that this is happening in a city where Big Labor has managed to drive out even film and television production, for which it’s known.
Predictably, the unions are not amused.
Union leaders have not made opposing Deasy a litmus test for endorsement, but many union activists are open about their desire to replace him.
The last thing this hot mess of a school district (I long ago decided I would home school my daughter if LAUSD were the only option and I don’t recommend anybody spend all day with me) needs is a union crony in charge of it to keep it in a perpetual state of underachievement.
I am a former teacher. I do not support education unions. The issue of using student test scores as part of teacher performance evaluations was discussed several times during my career. There are 2 criteria that would need to be met before I would even consider supporting such a proposal. 1) All students in all classes must be pre-tested at the start of the year to establish a baseline for comparison regarding their ability in each subject (in subjects taught in multiple consecutive years, individual student end of course scores from the previous year could be used in lieu of a pre-test). 2) Student performance on the end of year test much be part of the student’s grade for the class so that students have a reason to do their best on the test.
Sorry, but I’ll put on the union hat I used to wear many, many years ago. There is no way I would agree to have my members’ evaluated and thus retained, paid, and promoted based on something over which they had little control. Teaching kids ain’t making widgets. On a production line it can be set up so that you know exactly which guys on the line are responsible for assembling which parts of the widget, testing each function, and making sure the damned thing works before it goes out the door. Now, if you assigned a teacher a set group of kids that s/he was going to have every grade with no additions or subtractions from the group, it would make some sense to evaluate the teacher on whether that particular group of kids progressed from grade level to grade level at more or less the rate that would be indicated by the test/ability scores that the entered the group with. A teacher doesn’t have that.
S/he takes whatever kids the SD puts in the classroom with whatever ablilities they come with. Some got a good nights sleep after doing their homework, some played video games or watched TV all night, some couldn’t sleep because their crack-addicted mother was “entertaining.” Some had breakfast, some didn’t. Some had a family that potty-trained them and taught them basic skills like closing doors and turning off lights, a few might have even mastered please and thank you; don’t worry those will be ostracized as “too white” or “brainers.”
I’m not really defending teachers; they do a terrible job, but test scores aren’t the way to evaluate them because the teacher simply doesn’t have enough control over the inputs. The real issue is that like most government programs, conventional measures just don’t work. The old will somebody buy it metric doesn’t work when you don’t have a realistic choice. When you shop you might have a choice between Macy’s and Gimbal’s, but for most of us, you have to send the kid(s) to the public school or get your wastewater permit from the Department of Environmental Conservation. In such an environment, the way to have satisfied customers is to simply give them what they want, but that isn’t government’s job.
The way to evaluate teachers is to establish best teaching practices and evaluate teachers by how strictly they adhere to those practices. This would require the whole educational system to do something they violently resist, actually supervise teachers. Teachers get vetted to see whether they “fit in” in their, usually, teacher’s aide days and then in their time as a substitute or a non-tenured teacher. In those lowly states, they actually see a supervisor with some regularity. Once a teacher is tenured, they are essentially unsupervised and to the extent they are evaluated at all, it is a pro forma exercise. Unless there’s blood on the floor or the cops come, there’s not much that can get a tenured teacher fired because they’ve demonstrated that they’re “good people.” I’m not saying you can’t fire them; you can and I have, it’s just that nobody in the educational system wants to fire them so long as they remain “good people” and the cops aren’t parked in front of the school.
There is no way I would agree to have my members’ evaluated and thus retained, paid, and promoted based on something over which they had little control.
Well, then, we can see that you’re part of the problem. As a parent, I’d say that it’s your JOB to take an incoming class in September and impart a measurable body of knowlege to it by June. And tests are just the way to measure it – one in September, one in June.
If you feel put upon for being held accountable in that way, I’d say you’ll make a fine union official (hopefully in a far-distant state), but a lousy teacher.
Victor Davis Hanson has IMHO defined the problem with most American public schools very well. Perhaps the standardized test results of NCLB are not the best way to evaluate teachers, but even I, with no teaching experience whatsover, could devise a test for kids that measures how well they have been taught to use inductive reasoning and critical thinking skills, along with the facts needed to live a productive life. THAT should be the standard for evaluation of teachers.
Alas, the leftie teachers’ unions don’t dare see a generation taught critical thinking skills. they would be out on their collective asses so quick their heads would swim.
The LA superintendent ignores the very reason for the existence of government centers of youth indoctrination: to provide more brain dead Obama voters.
I’m a Conservative, and a former teacher. There’s plenty of blame to go around for failing schools, and radical unions aren’t helping. But let’s take some of Dr. Carson’s “logical thinking” and use it, k?
How is it logical to base a third of a person’s performance evaluation on test scores, when those scores are also dependent on the distribution of classroom hours among content subjects, behavioral issues and discipline policies over which they have little control, not to mention attendance, parental support, family dislocations, etc? How do you hold teachers accountable to a law (NCLB) that naively and unyeildingly demands that 100% of students will perform at or above the same predefined proficiency level at any given grade level, regardless of learning disabilities?
Generalizing about teachers doesn’t help solve the problems. And for those many who like to say they could teach better than the average public school teacher, I say go do it, and good luck with that. I’ve watched grown men turned into sobbing pools of melted jello by 2nd graders. Not just anybody can do the job, contrary to conventional wisdom.