EDUCATION: Growth-over-time formula has not yet been embraced by employees union.
Los Angeles Unified officials Tuesday unveiled a new way to measure the success of teachers and principals, releasing their own version of the controversial value-added method of analyzing test scores.
The academic-growth-over-time formula looks at how much students improve year-to-year, based on how they have done in the past.
It then predicts how each student should do, based on factors like socioeconomic status or special needs, to gauge a teacher's effectiveness.
District officials hope to eventually use AGT data to evaluate teachers and principals, a move that must be negotiated with the local teachers union, which has publicly opposed the use of value-added analysis.
Incoming Superintendent John Deasy, who moves into that post Friday, said he will release AGT data for all district schools Wednesday to begin a pilot of the new system.
"This will help us identify good practices, it will help everyone get better and it will allow us to have quality control," Deasy said during a briefing with the school board Tuesday.
Deasy said AGT data will be used to evaluate teachers during the 2011-12 school year on a voluntary basis as a test of the new system. | Related story:"LAUSD says furlough days, borrowing needed to avoid massive layoffs"
A maximum of 1,050 teachers can volunteer, although the data cannot be used to
make any hiring or firing decisions this year."We see this as a learning year," Deasy said.
Local teachers union leaders believe the school district is "steamrolling" new evaluations and bypassing negotiations by recruiting teachers to participate in the pilot.
In a written statement, United Teachers Los Angeles leaders accused the district of "bribing" teachers and administrators to participate by offering schools additional professional development money.
"If the district is interested in having a successful evaluation system, why are they rolling out a new system before negotiating. ... Why are they rolling out a system that contains the hugely controversial and unproven value-added method?" asked UTLA President A.J. Duffy.
Value-added methods of analyzing test scores have received a lot of attention over the last year, applauded by some education experts and elected officials, including President Obama and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.
But the method has also been sharply criticized by experts, and labor leaders say the statistical analysis is flawed and error-prone.
If the plan is approved by the union, district officials have said that test scores would only be one of several factors used to measure the performance of a teacher.
Still, Duffy raised concerns about the use of any test scores to measure the effectiveness of teachers.
"People want to use something as simple as a test score to fire people," Duffy said.
"But standing in front of a room of 30 kids to teach them a subject is hugely complicated. ... No amount of statistical mumbo jumbo can take into account all of the variables that go into each human being."
School board members celebrated the release of the new measure.
"There is no more important thing we could be doing than ensuring that every child in our district gets a great teacher, a great school leader and a great school," said board member Yolie Flores.
"I think we're going to lead the nation."
The LAUSD school board launched the process of overhauling teacher evaluations two years ago when it created a teacher effectiveness task force.
In November the district approved a $1.5 million contract with the University of Wisconsin's Value Added Research Center to develop LAUSD's AGT system. The district used federal stimulus money that could not be used to pay for salaries.
Dr. Robert Meyer, director of the Value Added Research Center, said by beginning to use this data LAUSD would join dozens of other districts nationwide that already use this type of information to evaluate educators, including all of the districts in Texas, North and South Dakota and Wisconsin.
Meyer also stressed that the information will help highlight not only which schools have high test scores, but which ones are helping students improve at the fastest rate. Releasing only a handful of information for schools on Tuesday, district officials said AGT shows that schools across the district are making great gains with some of LAUSD's neediest students.
In the San Fernando Valley, for example, teachers at Canoga Park and Reseda high schools and at Pacoima middle school have helped students make major improvements in their English test scores even though the schools' overall test scores continue to fall behind state and federal goals.
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