TheParagon-Education

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.

“What value-added models are doing,” Smiley argues, “is trying to give a very simple answer to one of the most complex questions that there is. What they are really trying to do is define teaching as a science. It’s not, it’s an art.”

Data limitations
Attempting to offer a genuinely objective assessment is no mean feat. Professor Alan Smithers, director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at the University of Buckingham in the UK, says that he is “uneasy” about teachers being evaluated publicly, not least because of the limitations of the data.

“If you are looking at pupils’ test results,” he says, “they depend on the pupils’ abilities, motivations and aspirations to study. Whether or not a child learns is ultimately down to them. (The pupils’ attainment) reflects a whole range of teachers they have had before, not just who they had at a particular age.

“I don’t think it will lead to good teaching. This approach will encourage teachers to develop a box-ticking mentality - teachers will play it safe. This approach would be absolutely terrifying for them, even if it were totally accurate. If you use the data in that way, it will have a massive impact on staff.”

On this issue, the LAUSD agrees. Despite further requests from the Los Angeles Times for the data that would allow it to update its teacher ratings once more, the district has steadfastly refused to release any details that would allow teachers to be identified by name. In December, the Los Angeles Times submitted a lawsuit to try to force the district to comply. The case has not yet been decided.

What has been decided, however, is a new approach to teacher evaluation in LA. Controversial moves to use teachers’ individual AGT scores in their formal evaluations have been watered down. In January, the LA teachers’ union, United Teachers Los Angeles, voted to go along with an agreement to base teacher evaluations on three factors: combination of raw test data, school performance and “robust classroom observation”. Although AGT scores won’t be directly used in evaluations, they can be referred to to provide “context” to a teacher’s performance.

This serves to illustrate the limitations of relying solely on test data. As the Los Angeles Times has already admitted, its scores “do not capture everything about a (teacher’s) performance”.

But the most poignant reminder of the limitations of teacher ratings comes from their most well-known victim, Rigoberto Ruelas. On the day of his funeral, LAUSD revealed that, in his final evaluation, he had scored the highest grade possible.

But more than two years after his tragic death, Ruelas’ name still appears on the Los Angeles Times’ website. Irrespective of the views of his colleagues and pupils, he remains one of Los Angeles’ “least effective” maths teachers.