Bad Dad and I have always believed that how much a student progresses in a school year, rather than a raw test score, is the best indicator of teacher effectiveness. After all, students have different abilities and come from different environments.
The LA Times started a multi-part series about teacher effectiveness, working up the data the way we've always wanted to see it.
Seeking to shed light on the problem, The Times obtained seven years of math and English test scores from the Los Angeles Unified School District and used the information to estimate the effectiveness of L.A. teachers — something the district could do but has not.The findings of the study confirmed two of my pet beliefs.
The Times used a statistical approach known as value-added analysis, which rates teachers based on their students' progress on standardized tests from year to year. Each student's performance is compared with his or her own in past years, which largely controls for outside influences often blamed for academic failure: poverty, prior learning and other factors.
• Contrary to popular belief, the best teachers were not concentrated in schools in the most affluent neighborhoods, nor were the weakest instructors bunched in poor areas. Rather, these teachers were scattered throughout the district. The quality of instruction typically varied far more within a school than between schools.The researchers are also careful to bring up the caveat that a multi-year analysis is required in order to rate teacher effectiveness. Every teacher has good and bad years. Over a long period, the most effective teachers will stand out.
• Although many parents fixate on picking the right school for their child, it matters far more which teacher the child gets. Teachers had three times as much influence on students' academic development as the school they attend. Yet parents have no access to objective information about individual instructors, and they often have little say in which teacher their child gets.
This brings up an ethical quandry; if the effective teachers are known, won't all the savvy parents request them? Someone has to end up in the classroom with non-effective teachers. Who gets to decide?
I've been the pushy parent that requested specific teachers. I don't know if it made any difference, but I got my preference the majority of the time. My daughter had only one ineffective teacher, and that was at a private school. (That specific teacher had a bad year and had been a good teacher in the past.)
How do I know if I picked the right teachers? I don't know and I can't go back and run a control. ;-)
In a couple of instances, I asked for the less popular teacher. They were known to be more strict, but I wanted a teacher that had both good classroom control, and was sympathetic to the unique challenges my child faced.
Another time, I just clicked with one teacher because she majored in the arts and worked in the arts before becoming a mother and teacher. Although her academic training was in the arts, she is very interested in the sciences and developed much of the school's science curriculum. I am just the opposite. Although I studied and work in the sciences, I have always been very interested in the arts.
My gut instinct told me that she would be very flexible about my child's schoolwork, despite the reputation for strictness. It turned out that I was correct; my child was assigned a highly individualized curriculum that followed the state standards, but in greater depth. It involved more legwork for me, but it was so much easier than schlepping her to a private school 5 days a week and then working extra hours so we could afford it.
Anyway, if you are worried, leave a comment and I will try to address it in a future post about how to make public school work for you and your child. I may elicit suggestions from experienced teachers, too.
The LA Times study is important. Go read it.
