photo by the author
Los Angeles Unified School District and United Teachers of Los Angeles have reached a
tentative agreement on new teacher evaluation practices and policies. The union will take up the agreement in a meeting of its governing body later today, and I expect that there will be some tough questions for the union leadership regarding compromises on the use of student testing results. A legal ruling against the district held that, under current law, student growth had to be a factor in teacher evaluation. That may be the law, but it still doesn’t make sense from an educational measurement or research standpoint. Judges, lawyers, and legislators cannot change the facts, even though they can ignore them: tests designed and validated for the purpose of measuring student learning
cannot be deemed valid for other purposes like teacher evaluation.
The favored approach in policy and politics these days – even though it doesn’t work – is to use “value-added” measures of student learning, trying to isolate the effect of a given teacher on each student. LAUSD has its own
photo by the author