History of IDEA
Jeannie Oakes, Founder and Former Director
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Separate study confirms many Los Angeles Times findings on teacher effectiveness
- 02-08-2011
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By Jason Felch/Los Angeles Times
A study to be released Monday confirms the broad conclusions of a Times' analysis of teacher effectiveness in the Los Angeles Unified School District while raising concerns about the precision of the ratings. Two education researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder obtained the same seven years of data that The Times used in its analysis of teacher effectiveness, the basis for a series of stories and a database released in August giving rankings of about 6,000 elementary teachers, identified by name. The Times classified teachers into five equal groups, ranging from "least effective" to "most effective." After re-analyzing the data using a somewhat different method, the Colorado researchers reached a similar general conclusion: Elementary school teachers vary widely in their ability to raise student scores on standardized tests, and that variation can be reliably estimated. But they also said they found evidence of imprecision in the Times analysis that could lead to the misclassification of some teachers, especially among those whose performance was about average for the district. (more...)
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