The Los Angeles Times Teacher Ranking Controversy

The Los Angeles Times is running a new series called "Grading the Teachers." There's been a number of articles published so far, and I meant to write something earlier. The Numbers Guy at Wall Street Journal published an analysis of the current methodologies of teacher rankings, and he mentioned the Times' series right when the controversy kicked up: "Needs Improvement: Where Teacher Report Cards Fall Short." There's a lot of problems with the selection of student populations assigned to teachers (some teacher get great batches of students) and the "sample size" is small, perhaps as little as 20 students upon which a teacher could be evaluated. And if the evaluation is performed over just one academic year, it might not fully capture the learning taking place, so it's a double-edged sword: One the one hand, you might see dramatic learning in one class with one teacher, but a whole school over time --- say over a five year period --- might not show as much improvement as other schools with a student body beginning with a lower skill set. The latter school would be rewarded with higher "yearly progress" evaluations, while a top school considered exceptional in a community could be considered underperformimg. The Times series in fact look at that possibility in one of its previous reports, "L.A.'s Leaders in Learning."

In any case, ABC News covered this in a debate last weekend, "Top Education Officials Spar Over Teacher Reform, Student Success."And recall my essay on this from last month, "Michelle Rhee and Teacher Accountability."