LAUSD Withholds Teacher Names from Evaluation Scores

The district says releasing names could cause jealousy among peers, weaken school morale and result in parents demanding teachers with high ratings.

The Los Angeles Unified School District has calculated confidential “academic growth over time” ratings that judge the effectiveness in raising student performance for about 12,000 math and English teachers last year. Though the district will not release the names of teachers and their scores, writes Jason Song at the LA Times.

By analyzing student’s performance on several years of standardized tests and estimate a teacher’s role in raising or lowering student achievement, the scores are equated. The district has issued new scores this fall to about 14,000 instructors and their principals.

The system has been echoed across the country, with school districts throughout the country have been adopting similar approaches. These have been labeled as “value-added ratings”, and has become a popular measure of teacher effectiveness.

The Times published a series of articles last summer based on value-added analysis, and since, L.A. Unified began calculating scores for teachers. And while the Times have published their scores, the district is less keen to do so.

“The potential harm to privacy interests from disclosure outweighs the public interest in disclosure,” said David Holmquist, the district’s general counsel, in a letter to The Times.

Holmquist cited that it could cause jealousy among teachers and lead to poor school morale. Public release of the sensitive figures could further harm teachers’ ability to get future jobs and that parents could demand instructors with high ratings, leading to unbalanced classrooms.

But after publishing their own, the newspaper filed a California Public Records Act request for the district’s own results. Kelli Sager, an attorney representing The Times, said:

“At this point, we have not received any records from LAUSD, so it is unclear what they are saying they will provide. We have ample authority that supports The Times’ request for documents, and if LAUSD refuses to provide them, we will have no choice but to seek a court order requiring them to do so.”

L.A. Unified has agreed, in principle, to release the scores — but without teachers’ names.

L.A. Unified Supt. John Deasy wants to include the ratings as one component in teachers’ confidential evaluations. But United Teachers Los Angeles has steadfastly opposed using test scores to rate teachers effectiveness.

Comments

Roque Burio Jr

December 1, 2011 at 11:39 am

From Roque Burio Jr the lemon who can dance and sing:
Here is my questioning song for Holmquist the counsel general of LAUSD: Mr. Holmquist, Mr. Holmquist from what authority, jurisprudence, or law could you cite that private interest of a teacher serving in public education outweigh the public interest of public school students? Or is it not that it is the vice versa of your claim? The school students need teachers of high performance and effectiveness which can only be reflected on the high performance and progress of their students. What measures can you suggest to evaluate the performance of students and the teachers other than the annual test scores of students?

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Roque Burio, Jr.

December 3, 2011 at 5:20 pm

From Roque Burio Jr. the lemon who can dance and sing, here is my song for LAUSD: LAUSD never had any objective way of evaluating teachers. It has been using very subjective, biased, erroneous and false evaluations to fail targeted old veteran teachers to cover up its financial and academic failures. It has no plan to improve its performance. It has no clear plan to fairly, honestly, truthfully and objectively evaluate teachers. It therefore deserves to be dismantled and transformed into city schools and /or private schools so the students can succeed.

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Roque Burio Jr

December 3, 2011 at 7:06 pm

From Roque Burio Jr. the lemon who can dance and sing. Here is my song for Mr. Deasy and Mr. Holmquist: I can show the two of you a research proposal designed to show the correlations of the test scores of students of a particular teacher with the performance and affectivity of that teacher. I know many of your math teachers can also do it—but the problem is why you do not want to correlate the test scores of students with their teacher’s performance. The research design that I will explain to you is very simple and cannot be negated by anyone. It will not take you an hour to understand it.

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Roque Burio, Jr.

December 17, 2011 at 1:05 pm

om Roque Burio Jr. the ugly duckling and the branded lemon who can dance but can also sing; Here is my revealing song about the spoiled kids: The LAUSD and particularly its superintendent Mr. Deasy and General Counsel Holmquist are like some kind of spoiled kids who could not understand the difficult economic situation they are in and would sue in Superior Court their daddy the State of California that can no longer afford their extravagant and unexplained shuffling of students residing in the valley to special schools in the city of LA , and those students residing in the city of LA are shuffled to the valley special schools to justify their unquenchable thirst for more money allowance.
I think the Court should ask these spoiled kids why they shuffled students to special schools in distant places outside their residence. Daddy Brown should teach these kids some discipline in extravagant spending of tax payers’ money. Daddy Brown should spank their… you know what!

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