Contact
Why not a Sunshine Portal for teachers?
Thomas Molitor
Usually this time of year in Southern California it’s the Santa Ana winds that fan regional fires along the dry inland coastal areas, causing emergency-response havoc.
This year, it is the recent release of a series of articles by the Los Angeles Times examining the use of student test scores to estimate the effectiveness of district teachers that has set off a controversial conflagration between parents, teachers, teacher unions and reform advocates.
Why do some students in the same school, studying the same lessons, sitting in the same classroom size, outperform students just down the hall?
Seeking to shed light on the problem, the Los Angeles Times obtained seven years of math and English test scores from the Los Angeles Unified School District and used the information to estimate the effectiveness of L.A. teachers – something the district could do but has not.
Six thousand elementary school teachers in Los Angeles have found themselves under scrutiny this summer after the Times published a series of articles about their performance, including a public-access searchable database on its website that rates them from least effective to most effective.
Value-added analysis
Working with an education economist from the Rand Corporation, the Times used a statistical approach known as “value-added analysis.” Proponents of the value-added approach say it identifies and can predict the effectiveness of a teacher by looking at the test scores of the teacher’s students over time. Each student’s past test performance is used to project his performance in the future. The difference between the child’s actual and projected results is the estimated “value” that the teacher added or subtracted during the year.
In statistics, it’s called “predictive modeling.” For example, if a third-grade student ranked in the 60th percentile among all district third-graders, he would be expected to rank similarly in the fourth grade. If he fell to the 40th percentile, it would suggest that his fourth grade teacher had not been very effective, at least for him. This would mean the fourth grade teacher “subtracted value” from the student’s level.
Conversely, if the student rose to the 80th percentile in the fourth grade this would mean the teacher “added value” to the student’s level.
The Times examined the performance of more than six thousand third- through fifth-grade teachers for whom reliable data were available. Among the findings:
- Highly effective teachers routinely propel students from below grade level to advanced in a single year.
- Contrary to popular belief, the best teachers were not concentrated in the most affluent neighborhoods, nor were the weakest instructors bunched in poor areas.
- Although many parents fixate on picking the right school for their child, it matters far more which teacher the child gets.
The Los Angeles teachers union president is less than sanguine about the Times doing the report and posting a database of its findings. In fact, he is downright livid. He is currently organizing a “massive subscription boycott” of the Times.
“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 as well.
Not ready for prime time
Ellen Bernstein, president of the Albuquerque Teachers Federation, was sharply critical of the Times project also, and said that the value-added approach to measuring teacher effectiveness is premature and “not ready for prime time yet.”
Nevertheless, the use of value-added modeling is exploding nationwide. Hundreds of school systems, including those in Chicago, New York and Washington, are already using it to measure the performance of schools or teachers. Many more are expected to join them, partly because the Obama administration has prodded states and districts to develop more effective teacher-evaluation systems.
Albuquerque Public Schools has the same type of information the Los Angeles Times used to calculate teacher effectiveness, but not for as long a period of time. And the APS’s information is kept in different databases.
Since New Mexico adopted the newest Standards-Based Assessment in 2007, the district has logged student scores on the test. It also has records of each of the student’s teachers, but in a different database.
One way to think about the Los Angeles Times project is as an understandable overreaction to an unacceptable status quo. For years, school administrators and union leaders have defeated almost any attempt at teacher measurement, partly by pointing to the limitations. Lately, though, the politics of education have changed. Parents know how much teachers matter and know that, just as with musicians or athletes or carpenters or money managers, some teachers are a lot better than others.
In recent years, there has been a big push for transparency in government throughout New Mexico. The Rio Grande Foundation and the Foundation for Open Government, along with a large and bi-partisan group of legislators, have generated some major successes.
This initiative has been driven in part by new technologies that make information more accessible to the average citizen such as the upcoming Sunshine Portal. It has gathered particular support in New Mexico because of rampant corruption and the realization that “sunshine is the best disinfectant.”
Why not a Sunshine Portal for teachers in New Mexico such as the L.A. Times project?
After all, just one of four state schools in New Mexico this year met Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) as set out in the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act. New Mexico fourth-graders ranked 49th among the states in the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading test.
We can all agree we want the very best, the very most effective teachers in the classroom teaching our children.
I think a teacher Sunshine Portal to track student performance over time is just one idea among many needed reforms that could become a ray of sunshine and help create a brighter future for our children’s education.
Molitor is an adjunct scholar at the Rio Grande Foundation and a regular columnist for this site. You can reach Molitor at tgmolitor@comcast.net.
Molitor bio │ Archives │ Feed
10 comments so far. Scroll down to submit your own comment.
Leave a response
You must be logged in to post a comment.
@Thomas Molitor, for the past several years, and probably forever before them, U. S. News and World Report has ranked UNM in the third tier and NMSU in the fourth, or lowest, tier of colleges and universities. Of course, the ranking methodology, which I do not recall, receives constant challenge, as do other ranking methodologies. From my experience, much of it decades old, the USNWR rankings seem about right. The relatively few issues would be at the boundaries between tiers.
These rankings should be no surprise. For at least a decade, the dropout rate has been about 50 percent, NM public school proficiency scores in reading and math have been about 50 percent, and half the NM public school graduates attending NM colleges and universities require remediation (the more required, the lower the chances of graduating. Only about 6 percent of enrollees graduate with a two-year degree from DACC; about 46 percent of enrollees graduate with a four-year degree from NMSU.
What troubles me is that, despite an education budget amounting to about 50 percent of the state budget, legislators put in only a small fraction of their time and energy on education issues. I have no sense that any of them know much about education, as opposed to management, legal, program, or budget, issues. I am discouraged that both gubernatorial candidates know virtually nothing about education. Both offer the standard party nostrums, without specific details of analysis,etc.
@ Michael L Hays
Do you know how our higher education institutions in NM rank nationally? And if so, what methodology is used to determine the rankings? One stat I came across (which had nothing to do with evaluating teacher effectiveness) ranked the percentage of NM college students who (a) start college and graduate, (b) graduate in four years, and (c) and who take six years to graduate. Not surprisingly, NM ranked poorly.
Reply to wedum 59:
I believe that everything which society wants and presumably tests is built into my suggestion. If society wants the multiplication table taught, it will test for it. If it does not, it will not. Moreover, I propose that this teacher evaluation approach be used more for diagnosis and development than “accountability” for the purposes of termination. Indeed, I worry that the testing implicitly defines the curriculum instead of the other way around.
Please note the importance I attach to the reshaping of schools of education as the greatest benefit to teachers. They take the rap for professors who dodge responsibility for doing a truly lousy job. Ask, say, NMSU’s Michael Moorehead, as I did, how he knows graduates are doing well, and his answer is that the school sends out a client satisfaction survey, which always gets good results. Can you believe this willful self-delusion? We all know that principals (1) take the time to provide the nitty-gritty, (2) think it is worthwhile to tell the truth, and (3) have no fear of repercussions if they tell the truth. Ask him, as I did, how he squares his claims of graduates doing well with the long-term mediocre 4th- and 8th-grade reading and math proficiency scores, and he mumbles.
“Contrary to popular belief, the best teachers were not concentrated in the most affluent neighborhoods, nor were the weakest instructors bunched in poor areas.”
This is not a popular belief, it is a statistical fact. New, inexperienced and non-credentialed teachers are funneled into the less affluent schools.
“Although many parents fixate on picking the right school for their child, it matters far more which teacher the child gets.”
My primary motive for keeping my child at the charter school is the fear that he would attend the middle school in my town. A school can have a systemic culture that can stifle, limit and oppress teachers making their job harder, if not impossible.
Value added assessment of teacher is voodoo statistics geared toward making legislatures feel better. For instance, suppose a math teacher has a class of high achieving students. If those students are already making good grades, the teacher is not going to be able to “add value” to and already achieving student.
If this state was really serious about education, we would have a statewide ban on TV and video games. Stop persecuting the teachers. Testing students only serves to mass “produce” people like “widgets” making them “Walmart ready” good little consumers. Those tests only serve to tie teacher’s hands and make our kids stupid “bricks in the wall”.
Pen Pal’s suggestion might work IF you factor in all the variables.
(1) Does this teacher always teach special ed students? or GATE students?
(2) Factor in the income level of the family and the education level of the parents in each class.
(3) Does the math test include logic questions? Or is it all the [16 x 16 = ?] type?
(4) Does the reading test include, for example, identifying editorializing in news reporting (now there’s a useful life skill).
Etc…
Have other commenters on this subject seen the movie “Stand and Deliver?”
BTW, in my home, my father had me stand up one night, when I was in the third grade, and figure out the multiplication tables in my head up to 17 x 17. He was committed to spending what must have been an hour or two to help me stretch my mind. And I have never forgotten that 16 x 16 = 256. Oh, and we didn’t have calculators back then, so he was doing the math in his head too.
I believe there is NO better motivator for a child than parents who are committed to, and involved in, that child’s education.
@beanie
Value-added analysis is of course just one view into evaluating teacher effectiveness. It only addresses one part (student scores) of one part (correlated with teachers) of the overall challenge of improving student performance. Home life. Parental involvement. The maturation of a particular child from year to year – all of course play hugely on how a child progresses (or regresses) from year to year. But, unfortunately (or fortunately), you can’t quantify parental involvement or home life or child maturation. So, the economist quants pull data from databases because that’s all the verifiable data they have to work with. School districts weight these results differently in evaluating teacher effectiveness. Again, value-added analysis has nothing to do with the very important other factors mentioned above.
Separately, since you have been an educator for many years, I would like to ask you a question:
Do you think pension reform might be an important factor in addressing education reform?
Over the last 25 years, the private sector has moved from having four of five workers in a defined-benefit pension to having just one of five workers in such a plan. Mostly, this means a shift to 401(k)s and the like, where payouts are related to what employees pay in.
Like most government employees, teachers have not made this shift. Their unions fight bitterly to retain the defined-benefit plans underwritten by taxpayers.
In a just released report by Education Sector, an independent nonprofit think tank, such a pension structure creates winners and losers. The losers include teachers who don’t wish to stay put for 30 years because their pensions are not portable: teachers lose big if they move to another school system, switch careers, or try to cash out. The report cites a 2008 survey in which nearly four out of five teachers agreed with the statement that “too many veteran teachers who are burned out stay because they do not want to walk away from the benefits and service time they have accrued.”
Do you think pension reform might cut down on teacher burn out rates and ultimately have more motivated, energized teachers out there in the classrooms?
I couldn’t agree with wedum59 more. To place full responsibility on the classroom teacher is to ignore the other major influences in a child’s ability and desire to learn and succeed academically. Parents and the home environment, peers who the student spends free time with, and what the student does with the free time can greatly influence academic success or failure. It is all too easy to place the blame for failure on an overworked, underpaid teacher in a crowded classroom who does not enjoy support from home. After twenty one years of teaching, I am well aware of the value of testing. But it is only one component of an accurate assessment. Hopefully we will not let it become the only one.
An interesting idea.
I love the union response: too much made to depend on one test, in the context of union objections to more tests. The easy inference is that unions, which, of course, represent teachers, do not want their members held accountable according to two simple questions: how well did you educate students for your time and effort on the job, and did the results justify your salary and benefits.
There is another way to get, I would imagine, similar results. Identify all students who pass 4th-grade proficiency tests in reading and math. Then identify all of their K-4 teachers. The teachers most frequently on student pathways to reading proficiency are better at teaching reading than those least frequently on those pathway. The same is true of math. Apply the same process to the 5-8 teachers of students who pass 8th-grade proficiency tests in reading and math.
At the elementary school level, the use of the results would be to identify teachers who are least frequently on both pathways, then those who are least frequently on the pathway to proficiency in either subject, and provide them with remedial training, more mentoring and supervision, and, if necessary, out-counseling. At the 5th-grade and middle school level, the same. Of course, in both cases, the results would identify the teachers most frequently on the pathways, and they could be accordingly honored or rewarded.
There is nothing complicated about either way to evaluate teachers’ performance. The fact that the data are available, the computations simple, but the systematic use of either method eschewed indicates that the question is not a technical one. It is a political one. In New Mexico, public schools are state employment agencies, politicians want people to have jobs, so no public official is going to urge any reform which, while improving student education, might jeopardize someone’s job.
As the measures of performance indicate, this assessment applies to the less effective teachers and not to the more effective ones. I sympathize with the minority of good teachers, who are stigmatized from their professional, institutional, and union association with the minority of bad teachers. As for the in-between teachers, the results can be a spur to them to do better.
It is illogical to think all teachers are good, they are not. We all know and have experienced poor teachers throughout our academic lves. But ask yourself about those poor teachers you knew. Did anything happen to them? Most likely they are still teaching or retired and were rewarded the same as the excellent teachers, thanks to the union system. Now ask yourself why accepting and enabling mediocre and low standards in teaching benefits our students. Then look at the results in our schools today, it is illogical to expect any better than what we get considering the system we have today. This must change, but why isn’t it? You can’t blame parents for all this, look somewhere else.
How about a “Sunshine Portal” for the parents too? It’s quite likely one component of success vs mediocre performance is parent involvement. And you need to look at the quality of the test too. Do you realize that each state has a different set of AYP standards? How about teaching the students to think, to evaluate what they read or see on TV, and test them on that? Critical thinking skills are much more important than rote memorization, for example.