Ranking And Disclosing Teacher Effectiveness

Photo by Reed Saxon / AP - An English class at Edwin Markham Middle School in Watts.

“According to Newsweek, the local teachers union is infuriated over the disclosure of teacher performance metrics. Quoting: ‘Do parents have the right to know which of their kids’ teachers are the most and least effective? That’s the controversy roaring in California this week with the publication of an investigative series by the Los Angeles Times’s Jason Song and Jason Felch, who used seven years of math and English test data to publicly identify the best and the worst third- to fifth-grade teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

The newspaper’s announcement of its plans to release data later this month on all 6,000 of the city’s elementary-school teachers has prompted the local teachers’ union to rally members to organize a boycott of the newspaper.’ According to the linked Times article, United Teachers Los Angeles president A.J. Duffy said the database was ‘an irresponsible, offensive intrusion into your professional life that will do nothing to improve student learning.’”

Source: Newsweek.com and Slashdot.com