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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 - 6:
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The project’s impact was seismic. In Ruelas’ case, his family said that he had become deeply depressed by his poor rating. After news of his suicide emerged, thousands of teachers turned up at the newspaper’s office in downtown LA, calling for readers to boycott the paper and demanding that the ratings be removed from its website. The banners on display were emblazoned with angry messages including, “We are more than a test score”, “Demoralising teachers hurts students” and “LA Times, how do you help our kids?”
But in spite of the outrage among the teaching community, value-added teacher ratings have not gone away. The scores can still be viewed on the Los Angeles Times website; Ruelas’ poor rating in maths - and his “average” effectiveness rating for teaching English - can still be viewed, just like those of the thousands of other teachers in the city.
And it’s not just the press that has shown an interest in the data. Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) now calculates its own teacher scores to evaluate the performance of individuals, and similar approaches are in use in many other school districts, such as Chicago and Columbia.
US secretary of education Arne Duncan has also come out in support of the scores, arguing: “The truth can be hard to swallow, but it can only make us better and stronger and smarter.”
Teacher scores have even made their way to the eastern seaboard. In February 2012, The New York Times published performance data for 18,000 elementary school teachers in the city.
And it’s not just the press that has shown an interest in the data. Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) now calculates its own teacher scores to evaluate the performance of individuals, and similar approaches are in use in many other school districts, such as Chicago and Columbia.
US secretary of education Arne Duncan has also come out in support of the scores, arguing: “The truth can be hard to swallow, but it can only make us better and stronger and smarter.”
Teacher scores have even made their way to the eastern seaboard. In February 2012, The New York Times published performance data for 18,000 elementary school teachers in the city.
But is rating individual teachers a genuine means of improving education through accountability? Should an employee’s appraisal be kept private and used purely for professional development, or can putting evaluations in the public domain be a real force for educational improvement?
If LA teachers were unhappy about being publicly named and shamed by the Los Angeles Times, they made sure that the two journalists behind the project - Jason Felch and Jason Song - knew what it felt like. “They were burning me and Jason in effigies,” Felch explains. “There were personal attacks on us. Jason Song got more of it because his name is easier to rhyme than Felch.”
The project began in 2009, when stories of underperformance in LA schools prompted the reporters to start looking into how teachers were being held to account by the school district.
But in spite of the outrage among the teaching community, value-added teacher ratings have not gone away. The scores can still be viewed on the Los Angeles Times website; Ruelas’ poor rating in maths - and his “average” effectiveness rating for teaching English - can still be viewed, just like those of the thousands of other teachers in the city.
And it’s not just the press that has shown an interest in the data. Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) now calculates its own teacher scores to evaluate the performance of individuals, and similar approaches are in use in many other school districts, such as Chicago and Columbia.
US secretary of education Arne Duncan has also come out in support of the scores, arguing: “The truth can be hard to swallow, but it can only make us better and stronger and smarter.”
Teacher scores have even made their way to the eastern seaboard. In February 2012, The New York Times published performance data for 18,000 elementary school teachers in the city.
And it’s not just the press that has shown an interest in the data. Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) now calculates its own teacher scores to evaluate the performance of individuals, and similar approaches are in use in many other school districts, such as Chicago and Columbia.
US secretary of education Arne Duncan has also come out in support of the scores, arguing: “The truth can be hard to swallow, but it can only make us better and stronger and smarter.”
Teacher scores have even made their way to the eastern seaboard. In February 2012, The New York Times published performance data for 18,000 elementary school teachers in the city.
But is rating individual teachers a genuine means of improving education through accountability? Should an employee’s appraisal be kept private and used purely for professional development, or can putting evaluations in the public domain be a real force for educational improvement?
If LA teachers were unhappy about being publicly named and shamed by the Los Angeles Times, they made sure that the two journalists behind the project - Jason Felch and Jason Song - knew what it felt like. “They were burning me and Jason in effigies,” Felch explains. “There were personal attacks on us. Jason Song got more of it because his name is easier to rhyme than Felch.”
The project began in 2009, when stories of underperformance in LA schools prompted the reporters to start looking into how teachers were being held to account by the school district.