Shame on the Los Angeles Times
- Details
- Category: Jeremy Addis-Mills
- Published on Tuesday, 24 August 2010 23:30
- Written by Jaddis-Mills
The Los Angeles Times has recently entered the headlines as the new maker versus news reporters. The Times’ new report on student test scores is simply another example of traditional news sources being interested in conducting sensationalist journalism opposed to remaining the standard barer of responsible traditional journalism.
This whole issue flew onto the scene like a bird dropping on the windshield at 70 mph. A week ago the Los Angeles Times announced that it was going to publish
online the results of a study that it had done based on California’s standardized test scores. This study utilized test scores from “more than 600,000 students in grades 3 through 5.” The scores were then analyzed by the Rand Corporation, on behalf of the Los Angeles Times, utilizing a method called “value –added” to produce a rating system. This rating system created a ranking system of “least effective” to “most effective” for more than 6,000 teachers in Los Angeles County. The published study is going to include the teacher’s names and the ranking that they were assigned based on the “value-added” analysis.
First and foremost, I think that our K-12 educational system is broken and has been for a very long time. As a recent (ok not that recent) graduate from the California public K-12 educational system, I realize the need for students to be better prepared for college or the general work force. The California State University and University of California systems have recognized for years that more and more students are requiring remediation to even be considered at college level in Math and English. This is appalling but this draconian finger pointing, that will no doubt ensue post the release of this data, will not get our educational systems any closer to fixing themselves; rather, it will only cause more confusion about he nature of our educational system and further feed into the demonization of teachers.
It is widely felt and considered by me that this move by the Los Angeles Times is an overall bad decision for our educational system. First off, the “value-added” system of statistical analysis is considered to be a good model but has been determined by researchers from the U.S. Department of Education to not be a stable enough model to really base teacher performance on. During an interview with NPR’s Robert Sigel, Jason Flech an investigative reporter who worked on this story, acknowledged this fact:
Mr. Sigel asked Mr. Flech:
Last fall, the National Research Council reported that school districts should not prematurely promote the use of value-added approaches to reward or punish teachers. I'm quoting from their release. It said too little is known about the accuracy of these methods to base high stakes decisions on them right now.
Mr. Flech responded:
That's true. And I think there's a very active debate right now about what's the best use for this data. Some school districts use this to reward effective teachers with merit pay. Some schools districts use this to target struggling teachers with professional development. Some school districts, like Washington, D.C., use this as 50% of a teacher's evaluation and can use it in a decision to remove an ineffective teacher.
This leads to my second concern. Parents will demand that their child have a certain teacher, no doubt the best, based on this report. This will pit parents versus schools, only further igniting tensions over the public K-12 system and resulting in the potential black listing or firing of teachers whose ranking was not high. Mr. Flech addressed this in the same NPR interview:
Mr. Sigel: “Well, would you expect, based on this information, that parents will start calling schools and saying, I want my kid to have Mr. Aguilar next year, not Mr. Smith?”Mr. Flech: “Yeah. I think that's very likely to happen. And I think it's a reasonable thing to happen too. I think some parents are going to learn that the teacher that their child is assigned to, by this somewhat narrow measure, is not very effective at instructing in math and English, or at least that those results aren't coming through on standardized tests.”
To be fair the Mr. Flech goes onto the say:
“What we're making clear to parents and all other readers on our database and in our stories is this is not the sole measure of a teacher, and a lot of parents care about things beyond standardized tests, and this can't tell them about that. This can only tell them how good a teacher is at raising or lowering a student's performance on standardized tests.”
The fact that the Times, through Mr. Flech, are using words like “narrow measures” in addition to disclosing that “this is not the sole measure of a teacher” all while creating a specific searchable database that will allow users to infer a specific thing, whether a particular teacher is "least effective" to "most effective,” leads me to believe there is a sensationalist agenda behind this story. The ranking system says it all. Why do they not label teachers as “statically lower improvements” or “statically higher improvements”? The use of this ranking system says they are looking for readers to infer that a teacher is good or bad. In fact, Mr. Flech even defends the use of this data to indicate what classroom one should advocate for their child to be in. I simply can’t get away from the suspicion that this is a sensationalized way of increasing web traffic and readership of the Times.
If the Times is really interested in protecting our educational system and not just simply driving traffic to the website littered with advertising, they should take the time and money to commission a long-term academic study that looks at why certain teachers have better outcomes than others. What learning adaptation could be taken from one classroom to another? This would have been a responsible way to use and report this information. We could use this as a base for evolving and changing our public K-12 educational system. Instead, we are stuck with nothing more than a ranking system that is going to provide nothing but heartache and stress for families, students, teachers, and the system. I will have to say it once more: shame on the Los Angeles Times.
