Following up on my post earlier this week on the tentative agreement in Los Angeles around how to incorporate student growth in teacher evaluations, there at least four more reasons why combining school-level student growth scores and raw test scores in a teacher’s evaluation is a bad idea:

Policymakers nationwide are focused on reforming teacher evaluation, and many are pushing to include student test scores as one measure of a teacher’s effectiveness. And there’s evidence that they have been successful: According to a report by the National Council on Teacher Quality, in 2009, only four states required that student achievement be the preponderant criterion in teacher evaluation;Continue Reading »

To fire or not to fire. Eric Hanushek and Diane Ravitch are debating the pros and cons of removing the lowest-performing teachers from schools: (Hanushek says student achievement will be on par with our global counterparts if we remove the bottom 5 to 10 percent of teachers; Ravitch says we should focus more on attracting and training top-notch candidates, rather than firing current teachers.) Continue Reading »

Student learning results shouldn’t count for 100 percent of a teacher’s evaluation. No one’s arguing it should.  But others, most recently the United Teachers Los Angeles, do argue that student learning should count for 0 percent of a teacher’s evaluation (the district is asking for 30 percent). There’s probably no magic number, but it’s important to keep Continue Reading »

A fascinating proposal is being considered by the Los Angeles school board (here). Yesterday was the first meeting on it. The district has 50 schools that will come on line in the next couple of years. Instead of having the district run all of these new schools, Yolie Flores Aguilar, the vice president of the board, has proposed that there be a competitive process to determine who runs these neContinue Reading »

Turning around a low performing high school may be the most difficult task in K-12 education. This week Sec. Duncan has suggested that charter schools should play a critical role in the effort to turn around low performing schools. Perhaps this comparison will start to suggest why. There is a lot to learn about two attempts started this year in Los Angeles Unified both of which have been backedContinue Reading »

About a month ago, my wife got an email from Virgin American offering some kind of insanely cheap promotional fare from DC to LA. So we decided to make a long weekend out of it, having never really spent any time there outside of the standard airport-taxi-hotel conference center-taxi-airport business trip where you’re never outside of air conditioning for more than 30 seconds. The flight Continue Reading »