LA Teachers: Good Teaching Takes More than Bubble Sheets

As a handful of Los Angeles Times employees watched from a balcony, hundreds of teachers hit the pavement below in our signature red union shirts, marching and chanting Tuesday afternoon in front of the Times building downtown.

Members of United Teachers Los Angeles turned out on the second day of a busy back-to-school week to voice our outrage at the public flogging the Times had rendered to scores of dedicated LA teachers. The Times published a front-page series rating individual teachers on a discredited “teacher effectiveness” scale that scores each teacher based solely on his or her students’ progress on the state test given each May.

This “Valued Added Model” (VAM), currently popular among education “reformers,” purports to be an objective measure of teacher effectiveness with its market approach to education. But the model is deeply flawed.

In its report analyzing the validity of using test scores to evaluate teachers, the Economic Policy Institute states:

VAM estimates have proven to be unstable across statistical models, years, and classes that teachers teach. One study found that across five large urban districts, among teachers who were ranked in the top 20% of effectiveness in the first year, fewer than a third were in that top group the next year, and another third moved all the way down to the bottom 40%... The same dramatic fluctuations were found for teachers ranked at the bottom in the first year of analysis.

Despite a growing body of analysis showing that judging teachers by their students’ test scores is, at best, inaccurate, LA administrators are about to jump on the bandwagon and join other misguided school districts across the country that have signed on to evaluating teachers according to this unreliable measure.

I wish we could blame it all on George W. Bush and his No Child Left Behind law, but the sad truth is that this is Obama’s baby now. When he chose Arne Duncan, the one-man wrecking crew from Chicago Public Schools, as his Secretary of Education, he guaranteed that his schools overhaul would lead to the privatization of public education. In Chicago, Duncan fired more than 2,000 union teachers when he closed down their public schools and gave them away to non-union charter operators—which are performing no better than the schools they replaced. And now Duncan is inflicting his “Chicago Miracle” on the rest of the country’s schoolchildren and their teachers.

SUPPORT LABOR NOTES

BECOME A MONTHLY DONOR

Give $10 a month or more and get our "Fight the Boss, Build the Union" T-shirt.

Public school districts across the country, desperate for federal funding now that cash-strapped states have cut billions from education, have sold their souls and thousands of union jobs for a chance to win the Race to the Top, a competition among states for a piece of the $4.3 billion pie Duncan is dishing out to “spur innovation in education.” No pie for you, though, unless you tie teacher evaluations to test scores, eliminate tenure and due process for teachers, and commit to aggressively turning over low-performing public schools to private charter operators.

Thus UTLA’s confrontation with the teacher-bashing Times. Teachers spoke passionately about the complex job of being a teacher in a complex system where so many factors are beyond our control, and of the devastating, demoralizing impact on those teachers who’d received poor rankings on the Times’ bogus “teacher effectiveness” scale. Is this the vision we need to produce an educated populace that can make intelligent, informed choices in a democracy? Will teachers really “perform better” with this Sword of Damocles hanging over our heads?

At the end of the rally, UTLA teachers and officers delivered an enormous report card to Times honchos:

Ethics — F

Journalistic Integrity — F

Working With Others — F

Objectivity — F

Honesty — F

Mary Rose O’Leary teaches sixth grade at Dahlia Heights Elementary.