When the Los Angeles Times announced it was releasing its analysis of how much value each one of 6,000 L.A. elementary school teachers had added to their classes, based on test scores, I knew how to test the validity of their project. I have spent much time in room 56 at Hobart Boulevard Elementary School in L.A., where fifth-grade teacher Rafe Esquith has proved himself to be, in my view, the best classroom teacher in the country — and certainly in his city.

Would the Times data back up Esquith’s exceptional quality, obvious to the thousands of people who have visited his classroom and to the audiences who see his ethnic Hispanic and Korean 10-year-olds produce and perform a Shakespeare play each year?

The Times released its ratings of all those teachers over the weekend. Fortunately for the paper, their numbers put Esquith in the top category: highly effective. He didn’t make the newspaper’s top 100 teacher list, but I know from extensive personal experience that such rankings cannot measure precisely all the qualities that make a good educator, or that make a good school. The newspaper gave the same highly effective rating to Esquith’s school, and to several of his colleagues there.

As I expected, Esquith isn’t doing much celebrating. He doesn’t think he needs test scores to show what he can do. He is also suspicious of any measure that relies on the results of tests that, at least at his school, are not independently supervised. At Hobart, as well as at many other L.A. schools, only the classroom teacher, with an obvious interest in getting good scores, serves as proctor.

Esquith told me he is happy that no good teacher at his school received a bad rating from the Times. But he said some mediocre teachers were rated more highly than they deserved.

“Hobart is rated as effective,” Esquith wrote in an e-mail. “That is not the case. Most of the kids do not read well. And they certainly do not read unless told to do so. . . . This survey is too limited. I wish it could point out that my students know more history than adults, and are very proud to be Americans. I wish the survey measured their ability in speaking English and playing music. And of course, their ability to score a baseball game.”

I have been collecting other reactions to the L.A. Times articles and data. I think the newspaper has done a great service by showing conclusively that schools should not be rated by their overall test score averages — more of a measure of family incomes, not of good teaching. Some schools in poor neighborhoods (such as Hobart Boulevard) have terrific teachers like Esquith who produce great gains in achievement, and some schools in rich neighborhoods have bad teachers that do the opposite.

But there are many other wise takes on what is going on. I recommend, for instance, this long post by award-winning Prince George’s County social studies teacher Ken Bernstein. He analyzes a new Economic Policy Institute briefing paper on using test scores to evaluate teachers. He mentions research relevant to the L.A. Times project. “One study found that across five large urban districts, among teachers who were ranked in the top 20 percent 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 percent,” he noted.

Another fine teacher I know well, Chris Peters, works in California, but not Los Angeles. He says the Times has exposed an unmet need:

“In 10 years at my high school, I can honestly say I have no idea who the stars are. I know teachers who are popular among kids, and I know teachers who teach seemingly awesome lessons. But I have no objective knowledge of which teachers are producing results and which aren’t. More to the point, neither I nor any other teacher I work with has any idea whether or not we ourselves are producing any results compared with other teachers. We only know the isolated outputs of our students while they are in our classrooms, totally divorced from any larger context that would give those outputs meaning. Only value-added analysis does this. In my years of teaching, neither I nor any teacher I have known has ever had a single meaningful, objective evaluation of their teaching outcomes; nor have we been given the means to objectively evaluate our performance ourselves. Tell what other profession that is like this?”

The writers of the Times series have been very prompt in responding to questions I’ve raised about the difficulties of fairly measuring how much value teachers add in schools where most students already start at a high level. I complained that one of the high-income schools their report made rated as inadequate, Wilbur Elementary, did not do so badly. Reading scores dropped only 3 percentile points, from 79 to 76, from second to fifth grade; and math dropped only 10, from 77 to 67. Wilbur students still achieved at a relatively high level.

Times reporter Doug Smith said other schools with similar high-income families did much better, showing that Wilbur had the potential to improve. At my request, he sent some examples. Wonderland Elementary went from 82 to 87 in reading and from 70 to 84 in math, quite impressive. Another example, Clover Elementary, had a smaller jump, from 77 to 79 in reading and from 73 to 76 in math.

This will not be the last word on what the Times has done. Its results will affect the debate over rating teachers for years. I don’t think rating individual teachers this way, publicly, is a good idea. It hurts efforts to turn a school’s teachers into an effective team. But I do think rating schools this way makes sense. The debate helps my thinking and raises the discussion to a new level. It also gave me a good excuse to talk to Esquith, one of the delights of my job.

Similar Posts:

Share