On Saturday, the Los Angeles Times began publishing a hard-hitting analysis on teacher performance. On Monday, the Los Angeles Times reported that union leaders are threatening the paper as a result:
The Los Angeles teachers union president said Sunday he was organizing a “massive boycott” of The Times after the newspaper began publishing a series of articles that uses student test scores to estimate the effectiveness of district teachers.
“You’re leading people in a dangerous direction, making it seem like you can judge the quality of a teacher by … a test,” said A.J. Duffy, president of United Teachers Los Angeles, which has more than 40,000 members.
Duffy said he would urge other labor groups to ask their members to cancel their subscriptions.
Based on test score data covering seven years, The Times analyzed the effects of more than 6,000 elementary school teachers on their students’ learning. Among other things, it found huge disparities among teachers, some of whom work just down the hall from one another.
The unions defensiveness here is especially galling when you consider that the Los Angeles Unified School District is one of the worst in the country when it comes to firing bad teachers. See this report from L.A. Weekly:
In the past decade, LAUSD officials spent $3.5 million trying to fire just seven of the district’s 33,000 teachers for poor classroom performance — and only four were fired, during legal struggles that wore on, on average, for five years each. Two of the three others were paid large settlements, and one was reinstated. The average cost of each battle is $500,000.
Read the rest of the story here
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3 comments:
Union pensions are being paid with our social security !
Telling the truth has been made politically incorrect.
I agree with holding teachers accountable as there are many that just show up and do virtually nothing, but what about holding parents accountable? I imagine that this post will see a lot of action today - the teacher bashing will certainly occur at some point, but once you weed out the radical comments, I believe that many people simply want to see effective, dedicated teachers working with children. Now, like I said, I think there needs to be a better way to evaluate teachers, and test scores, in part are certainly a good way to do this. Starting in just two years, Dr. Nancy Grasmick, State supt. of schools will unveil the new accountability evaluation instrument for teachers AND adminstrators. The people who are working hard every day will not have as many issues with this as those who are simply lazy and having agendas other than children. My concern here as a private citizen is that there is no accountability system for the parents. As a small business owner I live an die by the products and services I produce and maintain. Deliver poor product, and it is unemployment city. However, I have control for the most part, of how and what I produce. Schools have no way to control or influence the inital product, yet are responsible for superior results. Maybe in Hollywood you can do this, but if a K teacher has a roomful of kids that don't know their alphabet, basic counting, and basic writing skills before they get to school, they start significantly behind. My wife has a friend who is a K teacher in Somerset, and she told my wife that esseintially about two thirds of her class this past year could not identify their colors and shapes, count to 10, or know their alphabet before school started. While she is happy to teach these kids what they need to know, she is starting so far behind that she can't really ever catch up. Add to that the kids she has told us about who are chemical depenant via their mothers who abused their bodies during preganancy, and a variety of social concerns from homelessness to domestic violence, and the teachers have no chance. If you are 5 and worrying about little things like where you will be sleeping that night, or if you will eat when you get home from school, you really don't have a mindset for learning. Like I said, hold teachers and Principals accountable (and I think many would be fine with that if they had a chance), but we need to hold parents accountable. I certainly don't have the answer to all of this, but it seems to me there has to be a way to do this.
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