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Is The Teaching Profession so Black & White?
Teacher Assessments?
| “ I thought I was a good teacher and could not understand what was happening ” |
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Teacher Assessment - 2:
Teacher Assessment - 4:
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“What we realised,” Felch says, “was that there was absolutely no measure of performance. For decades in LAUSD, teachers have essentially been given drive-by evaluations - very quick visits from a principal sitting in the classroom, checking off. Nationally it was the same picture. Teachers all around the country were receiving no feedback on their performance.”
Progress v Achievement
While value-added (and contextual value-added) scores may have fallen out of favour in the UK, they have started to become more popular in the US over the past three years, and the approach piqued Felch’s interest.
“Schools were being called failing schools only because they had poor children,” he says. “Value-added was an effort to correct that by bringing in socio-economics, and bringing in growth rather than achievement level.”
By looking at how much progress a pupil makes over a set period of time rather than raw attainment, the theory goes, schools with low socio- economic catchment areas can be judged fairly alongside their neighbours in more affluent areas. The argument, staff at the Los Angeles Times soon realised, could be extended to teachers: they could mine the data to extract the impact of individual teachers in terms of how much value they added to pupils’ education.
After six months of haggling with the school district, the newspaper finally got hold of the figures it wanted by using freedom of information legislation. “No one had ever asked for the data before,” Felch says. “No one had even thought to ask. Even internally here, people were telling us, ‘You’ll never get that. They’ll never give you the data. Even if they do, you’ll never be able to analyse them.’”
But analyse the data they did. The Los Angeles Times hired Richard Buddin, an education policy expert at RAND Corporation, to do the number crunching, before checking his work with several other academics and its own in-house data experts.
But while critics of the project were quick to damn Felch and his colleagues as journalists out to take a cheap shot at the teaching profession, he insists that their motives were genuine.
“In the United States, our whole education system is a self-fulfilling social prophecy,” he explains. “Because of our accountability structure with testing, poor kids do poorly, rich kids do great on tests. That makes us think that the schools that these rich kids go to are great schools.
“[The system] is built on this ridiculous fallacy. Yet parents, teachers, the state, resources, all of it is geared towards this fallacy. We saw value-added (scores) as a way to cut through the socio-economics that are skewing the whole picture, and really shine a light among students, teachers and schools that’s not just a reflection of socio-economics.
Progress v Achievement
While value-added (and contextual value-added) scores may have fallen out of favour in the UK, they have started to become more popular in the US over the past three years, and the approach piqued Felch’s interest.
“Schools were being called failing schools only because they had poor children,” he says. “Value-added was an effort to correct that by bringing in socio-economics, and bringing in growth rather than achievement level.”
By looking at how much progress a pupil makes over a set period of time rather than raw attainment, the theory goes, schools with low socio- economic catchment areas can be judged fairly alongside their neighbours in more affluent areas. The argument, staff at the Los Angeles Times soon realised, could be extended to teachers: they could mine the data to extract the impact of individual teachers in terms of how much value they added to pupils’ education.
After six months of haggling with the school district, the newspaper finally got hold of the figures it wanted by using freedom of information legislation. “No one had ever asked for the data before,” Felch says. “No one had even thought to ask. Even internally here, people were telling us, ‘You’ll never get that. They’ll never give you the data. Even if they do, you’ll never be able to analyse them.’”
But analyse the data they did. The Los Angeles Times hired Richard Buddin, an education policy expert at RAND Corporation, to do the number crunching, before checking his work with several other academics and its own in-house data experts.
But while critics of the project were quick to damn Felch and his colleagues as journalists out to take a cheap shot at the teaching profession, he insists that their motives were genuine.
“In the United States, our whole education system is a self-fulfilling social prophecy,” he explains. “Because of our accountability structure with testing, poor kids do poorly, rich kids do great on tests. That makes us think that the schools that these rich kids go to are great schools.
“[The system] is built on this ridiculous fallacy. Yet parents, teachers, the state, resources, all of it is geared towards this fallacy. We saw value-added (scores) as a way to cut through the socio-economics that are skewing the whole picture, and really shine a light among students, teachers and schools that’s not just a reflection of socio-economics.