With crowded classrooms and fewer teachers, it is becoming more
important for parents like Becky Mattos to find the right educators
for her kids, and with more perspectives like hers there is a
national push for using standardized tests
– such as California’s Standardized Testing and Reporting
Program – as a barometer to evaluate teachers.
With crowded classrooms and fewer teachers, it is becoming more important for parents like Becky Mattos to find the right educators for her kids, and with more perspectives like hers there is a national push for using standardized tests – such as California’s Standardized Testing and Reporting Program – as a barometer to evaluate teachers.
“Parents should be able to know how good the teachers are,” Mattos said. “I want what’s best for my child.”
But it’s not that simple, said Mattos, who is the president of Sunnyslope Elementary’s Parent Teacher Organization.
“I can see both sides,” she said. “Parents should be informed, but it shouldn’t just be up to the STAR test.”
The recent round of debate on the matter largely is rooted in a change at the Los Angeles school district. In March, a district panel consisting of 50 parents, teachers and administrators recommended that the district use STAR results to evaluate teachers. Last month, the Los Angeles Times responded by publishing a “value-added”-based teacher database off those results that ranked teachers from “least effective” to “most effective.” The “value-added” approach evaluates teachers by looking at students’ STAR results.
In President Obama’s education reform, he calls for teachers to be held accountable by using standardized testing as a tool for critiques. The reworked No Child Left Behind policy has been met with criticism – mostly from teacher unions that say there are too many issues with standardized tests. Obama advised that the tests should help determine how a teacher would be paid.
The Obama administration’s proclamation has caused many school districts across the country, including the Los Angeles Unified School District, to discuss using standardized testing to measure its teachers, according to the LA Times. The teachers’ effectiveness is graded by the score projections made from students’ previous scores compared with their actual scores. The difference from the projection and the actual score rates the teachers’ overall effectiveness.
The L.A. Times report graded 6,000 teachers from third to fifth grade who taught at least 60 students from the 2002-03 school year to the 2008-09 year. The scores are based solely off the test results from STAR for English and math.
At the Hollister School District, the largest district in the county, teachers’ evaluations are not based off standardized testing – instead they focus more on the knowledge of the curriculum they teach, Hollister Elementary School Teachers’ Association President Joe Rivas said.
Rivas doesn’t foresee the district moving to test-based evaluations but he wouldn’t have a problem if district wanted to.
“If the district wants to do it – that’s the district’s prerogative, but I don’t approve of it being public,” he said.
But Rivas believes the tests are too small of a sample size to use as a tool for criticism.
“It is so hard to judge a teacher based on a test,” Rivas said. “It’s one week out of the school year – so much can happen.
See the full story in the Free Lance on Tuesday.
