What do you think?
Do you think parents should have the right to know which of their kids’ teachers are the most and least effective?
According to Newsweek, the local teachers union is infuriated over the disclosure of teacher performance metrics. Quoting: ‘Do parents have the right to know which of their kids’ teachers are the most and least effective? That’s the controversy roaring in California this week with the publication of an investigative series by the Los Angeles Times’s Jason Song and Jason Felch, who used seven years of math and English test data to publicly identify the best and the worst third- to fifth-grade teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The newspaper’s announcement of its plans to release data later this month on all 6,000 of the city’s elementary-school teachers has prompted the local teachers’ union to rally members to organize a boycott of the newspaper.’ According to the linked Times article, United Teachers Los Angeles president A.J. Duffy said the database was ‘an irresponsible, offensive intrusion into your professional life that will do nothing to improve student learning.’”
Do parents have the right to know which of their kids’ teachers are the most and least effective? That’s the controversy roaring in California this week with the publication of an investigative series by the Los Angeles Times‘s Jason Song and Jason Felch, who used seven years of math and English test data to publicly identify the best and the worst third- to fifth-grade teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The newspaper’s announcement of its plans to release data later this month on all 6,000 of the city’s elementary-school teache
rs has prompted the local teachers’ union to rally members to organize a boycott of the newspaper.
The disclosures are unprecedented, and it remains unclear whether other school districts or newspapers will follow suit; local laws prevent some school districts from publicly identifying their most ineffective teachers by name. It also remains unclear how the LAUSD will deal with parent complaints that their child has been assigned to an ineffective teacher. Los Angeles is the second-largest school district in the country.
Tags: Parents rights and teacher performance, Ranking teachers by effectiveness, Teacher incentives, Teacher rights
