History of IDEA
Jeannie Oakes, Founder and Former Director
Youth Voice in School Finance
NEW REPORT: Los Angeles' road to A-G for all
Without Dollars and Sense Powerpoint
Past Educational Opportunity Reports
Public displays of teacher effectiveness
- 12-15-2010
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Commentary by Rachael Gabriel and Jessica Lester/Education Week
Rachael Gabriel is a doctoral candidate in literacy studies at the University of Tennessee, and a former Washington, D.C., middle school teacher. Jessica Lester is a doctoral candidate in applied educational psychology, at the University of Tennessee and a former special education teacher.
Recently, a New York state court heard arguments around whether or not to publicly release value-added scores of 12,000 New York City teachers. The court hearing came only a few months after the controversial release of Los Angeles teachers’ scores. In late August of 2010, the Los Angeles Times began publishing a series of articles reporting on the quality of teachers and schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District, or LAUSD. In addition to the articles, the paper created a public, online database of individual teacher scores giving readers the power to hunt down “the ineffectives” —those teachers who apparently cause and sustain the achievement gap, many of whom, according to the Los Angeles Times, do so unknowingly. In this series, not only were we introduced to “the ineffectives,” we were also given one of many tools, value-added measurement, or VAM, to root such teachers out, and more easily identify “the miracle workers”—those teachers capable of leading their students to score higher than a statistical model predicted they would. When we conducted an analysis of the discourse that surrounds this debate, what was most striking was not the fact that the scores were released, but the ways in which language was used to question and/or silence questions about the implications and outcomes of VAM. (more…)
Also: Education Week
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