Teachers' Union boycotts LA Times

[The Silence and I]

...for using 7 years of student test scores to show that the best teachers improve students' scores and bad ones worsen them (:shock:).
Really.

Union leader calls on L.A. teachers to boycott Times
A.J. Duffy objects to the paper's analysis of the effectiveness of more than 6,000 elementary school teachers.
August 15, 2010|By Jason Song and Jason Felch, Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles teachers union president said Sunday he was organizing a "massive boycott" of The Times after the newspaper began publishing a series of articles that uses student test scores to estimate the effectiveness of district teachers.

"You're leading people in a dangerous direction, making it seem like you can judge the quality of a teacher by … a test," said A.J. Duffy, president of United Teachers Los Angeles, which has more than 40,000 members.



Duffy said he would urge other labor groups to ask their members to cancel their subscriptions.

Based on test score data covering seven years, The Times analyzed the effects of more than 6,000 elementary school teachers on their students' learning. Among other things, it found huge disparities among teachers, some of whom work just down the hall from one another.

After a single year with teachers who ranked in the top 10% in effectiveness, students scored an average of 17 percentile points higher in English and 25 points higher in math than students whose teachers ranked in the bottom 10%. Students often backslid significantly in the classrooms of ineffective teachers, and thousands of students in the study had two or more ineffective teachers in a row.

The district has had the ability to analyze the differences among teachers for years but opted not to do so, in large part because of anticipated union resistance, The Times found.

The newspaper plans to publish an online database with ratings for the more than 6,000 elementary school instructors later this month.

» Teacher Response If you have taught third through fifth grades in the Los Angeles Unified School District, you may be in our database, and we invite you to comment on your value-added score. To get started, please type your first and last names in the box below.


After learning of the analysis and the database last week, union leaders began making automated calls to teachers objecting to publication. In the Friday evening call, Duffy said the database was "an irresponsible, offensive intrusion into your professional life that will do nothing to improve student learning.

"Our attorneys are looking into the legalities of this database," he said in the recorded message. "This is part of the continuing attack on our profession, and we must continue to fight back on all fronts."

On Sunday, Duffy declined to talk about any legal action or other protests besides a boycott. "I'll keep that to myself," he said.

(Page 2 of 3)
Duffy attacked the reliability of standardized tests in general, but then defended the performance of his members in part by pointing to the rising graduation rates and Academic Performance Index scores at many campuses. The API is a separate statistical measure for schools which, at the elementary and middle school level, is entirely based on standardized tests.

» Discuss Do you think the value-added approach should be used to evaluate teachers? Why or why not?



Last week, the union president told reporters that he thought test scores could be useful as feedback for teachers but should not be used for evaluation.

The Times analysis used a "value added" statistical analysis of math and English scores from the city school district — the nation's second largest — to estimate the effectiveness of third- through fifth-grade teachers.

The analysis compared each student's prior performance to project his or her future test scores. The difference between the projection and the student's actual performance was the "value" the teacher added or subtracted. The results were averaged over at least 60 students per teacher to ensure statistical reliability.

The method, although controversial among some teachers and policy experts, has been embraced by the Obama administration and other education leaders.

One advantage is that it largely controls for outside influences like poverty and family background. Other districts are also using it as part of evaluations or the basis for merit pay programs, moves that have generated fierce resistance from some teachers unions and skepticism from some experts.

The paper received nearly 500 reader comments on Sunday's article. And nearly 300 teachers submitted e-mails to The Times to ask for their own value-added scores.

Many teachers were highly critical of The Times' decision to publish educators' names and their results. One teacher called it "a disgrace." Others, however, said it would foster a healthy discussion.

"Open debate and full disclosure will force those in charge to do something rather than play defense," said Gary Hubbert of Palm Springs in an e-mail to reporters.

Supt. Ramon C. Cortines acknowledged last week that the district had not made good use of its own data, which he called the best in the country. He endorsed moving forward with value-added as one measure of teacher effectiveness.

(Page 3 of 3)
Later in the week, Cortines asked state lawmakers to push through reforms to allow the district to make decisions based on teachers' effectiveness, not just seniority.

John Deasy, the district's recently appointed deputy superintendent and considered a likely candidate to replace Cortines, called The Times statistical approach "careful" and said he hopes to include value-added as a component of teacher evaluations. He said, though, that the majority of an evaluation should be based on teacher observation and other factors.



The current evaluation system consists of brief, preannounced classroom visits. Nearly all district teachers receive passing grades, The Times found last year.

Deasy said teacher effectiveness is "paramount; the absolute center of how we're going to improve student achievement in this district."

The Times will publish the database later this month after teachers have been given a chance to view and comment on their scores. The deadline for teachers to comment for the initial posting of the database is Thursday at noon.

Jason.song@latimes.com

Jason.felch@latimes.com

[Hotfoot]

There's a lot more to it than "Good teachers improve scores, bad teachers worsen them." Trust me.

Those scores can be used to hold entire schools hostage to the gilded calf of improving standardized test scores. Trust me when I say that past a certain point you stop teaching the material and start teaching the test, and man, that doesn't help the already difficult job of teaching, especially in some situations.

Let's even assume for a moment that the conclusions you are drawing are accurate. That lower test scores in an area means that the teachers in those areas are, in fact, bad, or as the article more tactfully puts it, "ineffective". Why are they bad? Can they just not teach effectively? Well, certainly that could be the issue, but then why?

Remember that any child that backslides is going to end up being a bad statistic later on for any future teacher that has them. Why should the teacher of an 8th grade child with a 3rd grade education level be made to suffer for the failures of teachers before them? These statistics don't take things like that into account, and the schools themselves have phased out programs that hold back children that do not pass, in order to be in compliance with the NCLB act. Were there "bad" teachers in the system? Well, let's assume yes. Where were they? The tests can give us a basic idea, but that's only if the tests are given every year, regularly, with the appropriate regulations, and if the tests themselves are effective indicators of a child's skill.

This gets rambling but there is a point to it all.

There are plenty of schools out there in dire straights, put there in part by pressure from families, the government, and the administration to do things that are not in a child's best interest. NCLB, the standardized tests, the DEMAND for colleges in place of vocational schools or other opportunities, the disappearances of shop classes, home economics, and let's not forget the travesty that is Sex Ed (Fuck, a previous administrator I knew RECOILED at calling it Sex Ed). Not to mention that basic money handling, managing bills, credit cards, loans, debt, insurance, etc. is not handled at all in schools (at least not as a state mandated requirement, oh but if you don't pay your taxes right you're fucked, and if your credit score is fucked, so are you, buddy!). The parents want you treat their mewling little brats like the saints they tell their kids they are, allowing for not one whit of discipline in some places, while in others the parents provide such spotty discipline in the homes that no incentive or punishment can work on the kids. Of course the administration has to battle with the fucking union and so battle lines are drawn between the tenured bastards who don't give a fuck and the administration who commonly just wants to pocket their six to seven figure a year paychecks each year until they can retire as millionaires that made their living while kids are using textbooks that offer up evolution as just one of many possible theories. Oh, and don't fail the kids because that means more paperwork and the school's overloaded as it is.

Meanwhile kids are growing up thinking everything is okay and they have a decent shot at a life outside of school, only to find out that those of them without familial connections, old or new wealth, or an honest to god in-demand skill don't get a magic ticket to happy-go-lucky land, and that the real world sucks and nothing prepared them for it, what with their everyone wins stickers and their "You tried your best" commemorative coffee mug (sponsored by Wal-Mart, the only place they can afford to shop), while all around us we can smell the corruption and decay dripping off of every branch of government and industry.

But hey, it's not all hopeless, many of them can get jobs, not careers, mind you, because businesses did the math and they've figured out every way to fuck you out of retirement as they can so that when you're 70 and looking down the barrel of cancer, arthritis, and dementia, instead of spending your twilight years in relative comfort as society's thanks for a job well done, you're greeting the next generation of little shits who don't know they've been fucked over yet as they grab applications for seasonal jobs because their parents fucking suck and won't buy them that shit they want from China because instead of making that shit in the US, they work for the company that outsourced everything to China and in order to keep their job they have to work overtime and they don't want to hear shit from their kids.

This goes on for a while, I have a lot of shit to put out there, but the short of it is this: There are shitty teachers out there. Standardized tests aren't the best indicator of even a student's advancement, much less a teacher's effectiveness. Teachers are terribly overworked, underpaid, abused by students, parents, administration, and the government. They expect fucking miracles as the teachers garnish their own wages, paying for union dues, school supplies, and so on.

That said, I'm not the biggest fan of Tenure, at least as it is now. It's too hard to fire someone who has it (though you can fucking ruin their career by one kid screaming rape), and there should be some sort of merit system that lets you fire really shitty teachers, I just don't think this is it, nor do I think that sub-par teachers are the biggest problem in the education system today. There are so many greater evils that are more easily solved than attempting a witch hunt with questionable data.

[The Minx]

Isn't that saying that the tests are designed poorly, as opposed to the ideas of standardized tests being bad inherently?

After all, the taxpayer needs some kind of fair yardstick to see whether they're getting their money's worth.

[Hotfoot]

Consider one of the biggest movements in education recently, smaller classrooms and more personalized teaching.

Now how do you make a standardized test that gauges things appropriately?

Maybe it would work if we had standardized textbooks, teaching standards, and standardized home experiences, but, quite frankly, we don't.

As far as the taxpayer getting their money's worth? That line of reasoning is what leads to entire communities losing any sort of effective education. Because of reports like these, schools end up getting more or less funding as according to their performance. The end result? Schools have trouble making ends meet now a lot of the time, and when funding gets cut, well, shit rolls downhill. With reduced funding, schools must cut programs, cut costs, cut teachers (and not the bad ones, the ones that cost the most), and even cut students. Ultimately, it usually ends up as a downwards spiral that ends with years of progressively shittier education until the school is forcibly closed and replaced by a charter school, which is a whole other ball of wax.

The moral here is that it's one thing to want accountability, but right now, it's solely on the teachers, and it is destroying the system. Teaching is a 60-80 (or more) an hour a week job, the pay is generally shit, especially for the first few years, until you have tenure you can be sacked for any reason at all or none in particular with no way of fighting it, not even if you pay your union dues. You have union dues to pay, plus hundreds, if not thousands of dollars from your own paycheck to pay for the school supplies that the school won't or can't supply you with (but you still need).

Meanwhile, where are the tests that weigh on the administration, the staff, the textbook authors and publishers, or even the test-makers themselves?

I get that people really don't like tenure, but this is an overreaction in the same way tenure was. We will not win this fight through further escalation, all that will result in is the utter destruction of the public education system.