TheParagon-Education

Winnetka Avenue Elementary teacher Lilia Alzate - classed as “least effective” in English and maths - admits that she has been seriously affected. “Your publishing (of) these test scores (has) kept teachers awake at night, including myself. Could it also be that some who have suffered a degree of emotional instability may not have survived your ratings?”

Although Stephanie Logan, who teaches at Seventy-Fifth Street Elementary School, is classed as a “more effective” maths teacher, she is described as one of LA’s “least effective” English teachers. “I feel like I’m being punished for being responsible and not saying ‘no’ when I was asked to take (difficult) students,” she writes. “I feel hurt and humiliated to be rated like this. Should I have refused to take those students in?”
Her colleague James Melin, classed as a “less effective” maths teacher, puts his point across more forcefully. “Listen,” he writes. “I teach in an area of south Los Angeles that most of your readers wouldn’t want to drive through. I work at a job that most of your readers wouldn’t dare undertake because I am so underpaid for what I do. I work for a district that has seen it fit to lay me off the past three years, only to rehire me at the very last second.

“Nobody who matters give a hoot about your rating…I will be receiving ‘thank you’ notes from many of my students when they are in college or are productive adults in society. At that time, my effectiveness as a teacher can be measured.”

Felch acknowledges that the ratings aren’t 100 per cent accurate. “Our confidence in these figures varies,” he says, “and these are not exact figures, they are estimates. That’s the best you can do with this. The data’s strongest at the two extremes. It’s a big bell curve, in the middle it gets squishy.”

When I ask Felch about the impact on teachers, he is unrepentant. “The kneejerk reaction is that this is evil and wrong, and is going to perpetuate all the inequalities,” he explains. “When you understand the goals of value-added, I would think teachers would be excited. For the first time in their careers, they have an opportunity to succeed even if they teach poor kids. Here’s a system that will level the playing field, and try to take out of the equation all the socio-economic stuff they feel that they are blamed for by society.”

But it is not just teachers who have expressed reservations about the scores. Two years ago, Derek Briggs and Ben Domingue of the National Education Policy Centre analysed the Los Angeles Times’ ratings. They concluded that the newspaper’s research “was demonstrably inadequate to support the published rankings”. In its next set of teacher scores, the newspaper altered its methodology.

Speaking at the Education International (the global federation of teacher unions) conference in London in January, Lily Eskelsen, vice-president of the National Education Association, added her voice to the debate.
“I wouldn’t mind the ranking so much if it was just used on the sports page where it belongs,” she quipped, adding: “We’re making decisions around bad data… (The Los Angeles Times reporters) put a small disclaimer on their work saying that yes indeed, they know that what they’re about to tell you is not accurate, and then they use that disclaimer as permission to proceed with giving you bad information.

Schools join in
But it is not just the newspaper that is now making use of the data. Although LAUSD was initially reluctant to put the data in the public domain, it has - perhaps surprisingly - now decided to put together its own value-added scores.

After first publishing value-added data - dubbed Academic Growth over Time (AGT) - at a school level, it started a pilot scheme on individual teachers. Crucially, the teacher-level ratings are not made public, but many - no doubt scarred by their experiences with the Los Angeles Times - are still less than impressed.
According to the AGT system, Brent Smiley, who teaches social sciences at Lawrence Middle School in Chatsworth, near LA, freely admits that he is “one of the ‘least effective’ teachers in the district”.

When I ask him why, he pauses for dramatic effect. “No matter what I do,” he finally answers, “I can’t get 103 per cent of my kids over the bar.” He bursts out laughing.

Smiley’s problem, he explains, is that the pupils at his school are too good. “The kids I teach are gifted and highly gifted, the school’s a magnet for them. And so last year I had 97.7 per cent of my students reach advanced or proficient. I was only able to go up about 1.5 per cent (from the year before).”

Compared with the set goal of a 6 percentage point increase, Smiley had - through no fault of his own - fallen short.

The relative nature of the accountability system has created perverse incentives for teachers, Smiley explains. “I would be best served personally to have my students tank the testing every other year. That would mean that one year I’d be the ‘most effective’, the next year I’d be the ‘least effective’, and I’d get ping-pong balled. That is not healthy for anyone, that’s not what I’m doing. I don’t care a damn about my test scores (but) I owe it to the kids to get them to be as proficient as possible.”

So how does Smiley play the system to achieve such good scores for his pupils? “I’ve figured out how to beat the test,” he admits. “It’s just a vocab test they take through social studies, that’s all it is. It’s a piece of cake. We spent five minutes a week on it, and we hit 97.7 per cent.”

But the irony for Smiley is that, having learned how to game the system, he can teach the way he wants to. “By figuring out how to beat their test, it freed me up to go about teaching the right way. But not everyone has the luxury of kids who are at the upper echelon.”

By trying to create a new accountability system that aims to ensure that teachers are teaching well, some teachers are paradoxically having to focus on getting a good score, rather than on providing a good, rounded education for their pupils.