How The Times built teacher effectiveness database [Updated]

The Times soon plans to publish a database on its website charting Los Angeles Unified School District teacher performance, allowing parents and others to examine the information.

In the video above, Times Database Editor Doug Smith describes the yearlong effort to gather the test scores and build the database. He also talks about the efforts over the last few weeks to provide teachers with the information before it goes online, giving them a chance to submit comments that will appear next to their scores. Smith said. The Times assembled a team to send out the information to nearly 2,000 teachers.

Smith also addresses some of the concerns raised by teachers and others about publishing the data. Smith said he's aware of concerns that the database could embarrass teachers and confuse parents. But he said he felt strongly it is important to make the data public and spark a debate about how to better use the information in making schools better.

What do you think? Share your views below.

[Updated Aug. 29 at 8 a.m.: Visit The Times' Los Angeles Teacher Ratings database, which launched Sunday, to learn more about how effective 6,000 Los Angeles Unified elementary school teachers have been at improving their students performance on standardized tests.]

More: About | Q&A: Value-added | Research | Methods paper | How teachers can comment

Comments

[Robert Ameeti]

Thank goodness that the Times has the juevos to publish this data. Let the accountability begin.

[eric]

POST IT!

[Carol]

When is the Times going to investigate school site and, more importantly, non-school site administration. At least 20-30 kids a day see teachers in action. Who knows what administrators are doing downtown or at satellite offices.

[George]

How can you judge a teacher who has to teach crack babies and meth kids? Special ed kids, Tasmanian devil kids? I've seen neighborhoods where many parents of kids are unteachable--or insane. You're making a hard job worse. What about sleep deprived kids? Half the kids in LA are probably sleepy because they stay up too late. Sleep deprivation drops a kid's performance 2 grade levels. Teacher bashing and union bashing may make more students defiant in their classrooms, causing worse problems than we have in our schools. What is to stop administrators from assigning the troublesome kids to teachers they do not like? You had better think carefully about the long-term consequences.

[Carmen]

Thanks for ruining this recent Harvard grad's prospects of wanting to go into teaching and making my decision to NOT go easier. I am not sure why anyone would want to go into teaching when you are putting out teachers' data and everyone keeps blaming schools for the students' lack of learning.

I've sat in classrooms all my life with kids who didn't want to learn, and bothered kids around them, and prevented them from learning and thought I should go into it with Teach for America to make a difference because of a former teacher.

I was on the fence about going into teaching or medicine, and have since decided it would be better to go to medical school than to go into teaching.

Your shining a light on the teachers is making it easier for hiding the students in the dark.

[Mary Naylor]

A test measures many things, including the test itself. I am a retired teacher
that has worked for many years in the system. As I look back, I reflect
and think about those tests. There are so many variables, and one of the most crucial variables, in my opinion, is the child. Where is he coming from? How
well does he understand the language he/she is being tested in? Is the child working at grade level. Does the student often move from school to school?
Does the student have special needs? Many an heroic teacher may look
ineffective judged by a criteria that doesn't take into account the learning
needs of the student.

[frank valderrama]

It is disgraceful publishing teacher scores to the public without knowing all the variables that go into the teaching process.

Teachers do not get the same students.
Teachers get students according to who the adminstrator likes. "Favoritism".

There are many more variables, but the Times does not seem to consider this important. If you keep attacking teachers, in the near future their will be no more people want ing to enter the teaching profession. There is going to be a big shortage of teachers if you keep attacking them. Please attack adminstrators. Attack the curriculum, but not teachers. They are the most noble people I know.

[hadityet]

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Go LA Times!!!!

[whitenoise]

when will the times print the names and effectiveness of the bureaucrats who make upwards of 100k annually but cry "too much work to get rid of bad teachers?" and when do we get the names of the students who fail because they do no classwork? on the latter, parent names will suffice.

[shawna]

God Bless America and our Freedom of the Press

[LAUSD teacher]

You are assuming these scores mean anything. The fact is that middle class and upper class public schools offer much more of a real education plus electives plus travel. They don't use curriculum out of a can. There is no tagging and no gangs and no students with electronic monitoring bracelets. It doesn't matter what the test scores of the teachers are. It is everything else that counts so much more. School culture counts for a lot more than test scores.

Teachers, keep fighting back against this.

[LAUSD teacher]

You mean let the witch hunt begin.

[Andy]

When will people learn - a school has a responsibility for the education of a child, that is true of course. However, the education of the child is the responsibility of not only the school but also the parents and, to be perfectly the honest, the child themself.

Blaming teachers exclusively for a lack of progress in a child's education is extraordinarily naive and short sighted.

This kind of anti-teacher mentality also makes it even more difficult for teachers in the classroom.

[LAUSD teacher]

If only we would have been this hard on Enron, instead of $50,000 a year teachers. Imagine the money we could have if we had held them "Accountable." But it is so much easier to hold teachers and the "powerful" teachers union "acountable."

[jane]

Before you do any kind of expose on the "effectiveness" of teachers, you should spend a day in my classroom. Spend one full day to see what we (teachers) have to deal with when "teaching." Maybe you wouldn't be so eager to blast teachers when you spend a day in our shoes.

[Long Beach Unified teacher]

As a teacher in a low-income school and a parent of a student in a high-income school, I can attest to the fact that test scores do NOT measure a teacher's performance. Many of my son's teachers were, um, I'll just say "less-motivated than I would have liked." But guess what? My son & his classmates performed beautifully on state tests!
Where I work, the teachers do everything but tapdance & juggle in an effort to make up for poverty, ignorance, or the inability to speak English. We attend countless mandated trainings, are constantly jumping through hoops to utilize ever-changing teaching methodologies, only to be told 2-3 years later that there's something new and BETTER!
I've seen teachers eschew all other subjects and teach exclusively reading and math to these low-scoring students. "No, you CANNOT play violin with the school orchestra. You're not reading at grade level yet." And I don't mean "reading" like we remember, mind you (real literature, independent reading, book reports, etc.). No -- this is "read this one-page mini-story and answer these 5 questions." Just like the test. The ENTIRE reading curriculum is with the intent of getting kids to score better on tests.
Math is taught in the same way. We have been told how many of each type of math question will be on the state test (it's available online). We use sample questions from the state, and then re-write many, many different versions of the same questions that are on the test. We drill the kids until they can do that specific type of problem in their sleep, then we move on to the next most-frequent question type.

Yes, the kids do better on the state test. Great teaching? The Times seems to think so!

How about the teachers in these schools who are so strict that children are afraid of them? Yes, they will be on-task when you enter the room to observe, but is that the measure of an effective teacher? The Times thinks so!

The human element of teaching cannot be measured by a standardized test. When any of us looks back to our most memorable & effective teachers, do we say, "ah! Mr. So-and-so! He taught me how to do well on the CAT6!"? I remember Mrs. McCue's Hawaii unit (we ate poi!), Ms. Maben's biology class (awesome labs), and they way Mrs. Carroll indulged a 5th grader's love of New Wave music by allowing me to write about my favorite bands. My best teachers were professionals and were allowed to be creative in the ways that they presented learning. I'm afraid this style of teaching is going away as more and more credence is given to the Almighty CAT6. It's shameful, and The Times is escorting us further down this road by making the teaching profession competitive.

[ohplease!]

Maybe the kids would do better if we stopped trying to mainstream special ed students into the regular classrooms. Teachers in these classrooms are given "handy tips" to help these special ed children and all the other children. Forget the tips, give teachers the resources and help for all the children of varying levels and abilities.

[Laura]

I feel so awful for teachers! It seems like this is important data, but giving teachers a chance to review this sort of thing and work to improve it seems like a better idea.

I can't imagine that any public employee's data...like police officers' arrest records by race or the number of civilians that died on a certain firefighter's watch...would ever be released to the public, even though they are paid by tax dollars as well. It's a matter of dignity, not just a matter of public information.

Every profession has its excellent, average, and bad employees. It just seems like teachers are taking the heat lately. I love my son's school, and I hope that any of the wonderful teachers who work there don't quit because of this story!

I've had really good evaluations at my job over the years, but my goodness, I wouldn't want them posted for the world to see.

[igiveup]

I wish that the public could get a look at the tests that are being used to measure my colleagues' performance. I remember one question, meant to assess understanding of even/odd numbers on a primary grade test. The teacher would read aloud, "Evan is on the softball team. His shirt has an odd number. Color the circle under the odd number". Really? EVAN? Sigh. Exceptional fun with second language children.

[Kyle Norwood]

There are so many ways for this data to misrepresent what teachers are doing. Here's one you really should check out. Teachers are sometimes absent on testing days, which means that a substitute administers the test. I know that substitutes do their best, but the fact remains that students see a substitute in front of the class as an invitation to goof off. I'll bet test scores are dramatically lower when a sub administers the test. (I had to sub on a test day last year and had some trouble with a couple of "gang-banger" types, a process which amused and distracted every student in the room.) If subs have a substantial effect on test scores, then all scores should be adjusted to take this into account. The problem is that dozens of other adjustments of this kind would be needed to make these tests do what they were never intended to do: evaluate individual teachers.

[ARD]

High stakes tests, in most arenas, are designed to generate data in one specified area, or at most two. The California Standards Tests (CST’s) were designed to simply inform teachers of their strengths and weaknesses regarding their ability to teach course content learning standards and serve as a measurement of student progress to rank a school’s instructional program. With this in mind, it would seem wildly irresponsible to measure overall teacher effectiveness, overall student progress, and overall school achievement with this single assessment tool. The rationale to abruptly ramrod this misused test down the throats of teachers, therefore, appears to have less to do with improving student learning and more to do with the politics of destroying teacher job protections. With 40% of California’s general fund earmarked for education, and about 80% of those public education funds tied to teachers salaries, an argument can be made that teacher seniority and experience in the classroom – which result in higher salaries – are moot if tests scores reveal little relation between experience and higher tests scores. Thus, pinning teacher evaluation and retention to results on a test never designed to grade teachers seems like a nice way to smear teachers, smear teacher protections, crush teacher unions, and ruin a critical profession for at least a generation.

Also, isn't it interesting in recent articles that the Times used and older white teacher to demonstrate low performance regarding the use of value-added analysis, but chooses a younger Latino teacher to highlight high performance. In addition, their photos show a black female principal overseeing a veteran white female teacher (a highly-regarded National Board-certified teacher, no less) who was "underperforming" in preparing her students for success on the CST. The principal, who never had to undergo any "value-added" measurement gauntlet, is cited as saying she has identified "about eight teachers" she has tabbed for termination via the use and application of this data. The Times', and their smug and ill-advised showboating concerning the use of this data, will come back to haunt them. With chests out and smiles on their faces, they are revealing their sad understanding of the real mechanics behind classroom instruction, while exposing their blind allegiance to corporate pirates that want to dismantle protections for our dedicated foot soldier teachers that serve duty in the challenging and often-depressing arena that is LAUSD public schools. You are hitting teachers when they’re down, and gut-punching the older teachers that stick around. The Times' are carrying the wrong spit bucket, and their misguided gotcha journalism is going to ruin the public teaching profession for a generation. Nice job!

[TATE]

Just about time teachers are held accountable for their work. This information needs to be used to better the system and not just to beat up teachers.
The teachers that get most effective should be rewarded. The teachers who get effective should get noticed and teachers that are least effective should have to be retrained and retrained and then fired just like any other job. If the teacher always has least effective on scores year after year then it's not the kids.

[Sanford Gordon]

I laud Mr. Smith and Feltch,Soong and their team creating this Investigative Series as for the LA Times is doing what a REAL Newspaper should be doing and that is in a way exposing a dysfunctional, corrupt LAUSD School Board as well as their Partners the UTLA (A.J.Duffy) Teachers Union. the 37 1/2% Drop out rate is not a accident as the Union has not allowed teachers to be reviewed as to
performance, productivity both as to the students they teach or what they bring to the classroom. The results of this study tend to indicate that the individual teacher is the sole arbiter of what is right and good and not the system where as the system should be able to evaluate the results and from that be informed as to who is and who is not doing a acceptable job. The study shows Money is not the answer but it is the human being meaning those who should be performing or supervising or motivating are found lacking. We all thank you Mr. Smith for your courage and the Times for what we all may hope is a new begining in reporting the truth not enhancing a agenda.

Thank You

[Sanford Gordon]

Ask yourself one Question:

How can you reward or give recognition to any Teacher other than there attendance and logetivity record since the Union CBA will not allow a teacher either to be properly reviewed as other institutions do on a annual Review basis and also create obstacles to prevent those who wish to bring forth an equitable Performance Review vehicle to begin the arduous
task of taking back the SCHOOLS then to their prime mission of teaching and not being a Political Tool for the Politicians use for a breeding ground of discontent and promotion of concepts that reward failure rather than building growth and academic achievment. The District has only 400 non Union Employees and 30,000 Teachers who are in the Union and 4 of their compadres are on the School Board and if that does not spell out why it is that the District cannot perform, I do not know what else can be brought forward. With there Record of failure both as to academic Achievment and Finacial Management, They would have been recalled and fired years ago. They use Children as a ladder to achieve their personal goals but leave them on the curb and disregard them in the end. The evidence is simiple as you currently have 150 teachers who have been fired during the last 2 to 5 years still collecting their pay while they sit at desk doing nothing because the UNION HAS THE TEETH to prevent any progress, or Reform.
If one could look at this report and say Whoa, Let us recall the School Board, Cancel the Collective Bargaining Agreement and install a committed Performance Team to turn this institution around and save the Children now for the sake of the future generations of this community.

Please LA Times continue this kind of reporting which would allow the District to perform it assigned task and root out the evil as installed by the politicians, School Board and Unions for you have before you their results with the large drop out rate and no Teacher review which allows the virus to corrupt from within and reward itself with Benefits and
imcompetence because they are protected and no one can remove them or have the incentative to do so.

Thank You

[JGiles]

What do avaricious sods, self-indulgent weirdos, and value added ratings have in common? If you answered, "They all dam the flow of effective communication," then pat yourself on the back. It may help if I begin my discussion by relating an innocuous story in order to illustrate my point: A few days ago I was arguing with a particularly baleful, irrational dweeb who was insisting that taxpayers are a magic purse that never runs out of gold. I tried to convince this brutal, materialistic exponent of separatism that value added ratings's causeries are eerily similar to those promoted by madmen such as Pol Pot. What's scary, though, is that their extollment of immoralism has been ratcheted up a few notches from anything Pol Pot ever conjured up. Anyway, I hope I've made my point, which is that the reservoir from which value added ratings draws its buddies is primarily the masses of the most intrusive astrologers you'll ever see.