School evaluation blueprint

Opinion: May 2, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

School reformers marched forward again this month, and that’s good news for students.

On April 14, Houston’s school district became the latest to adopt using testing data as part of the way to evaluate its teachers. Houston’s school board agreed to let principals use a mixture of student scores, including from Texas’ achievement test, to determine how well teachers perform.

The scores aren’t the only part of the evaluation. But their inclusion will benefit students immensely. Teachers who aren’t helping them improve will become more apparent to administrators. And either the schools help them improve or they move them out.

Social justice issue

One day later, on April 15, Los Angeles’ school board officially selected John Deasy to lead the Los Angeles Unified School District. An educator who sees good schools as a social justice issue, Deasy has made getting effective teachers in every classroom the centerpiece of his reforms.

In September, when Deasy was serving as deputy superintendent, Los Angeles’ school board decided to use test scores as part of the way to evaluate teachers. As a trial run, Deasy wants to show teachers how the data would have affected their evaluations if it had been part of this year’s official review.

Houston and L.A. aren’t the only places trying to use testing data to evaluate teachers. Washington, D.C., Louisiana, Tennessee and Colorado are among the school districts or states that have decided to use testing scores as part of an annual review.

Of course, all of these places have many hard-working, good teachers.

But there may not be as many effective teachers as evaluations claim. Ninety-nine percent of Houston’s teachers show up in the top two evaluation categories. Ninety-eight percent of Dallas’ school teachers fall into the top two ranks. And 99 percent of Los Angeles’s teachers earned at least the “meets standards” rank.

But those teachers work in districts where many students don’t graduate from high school, few master tough courses and many aren’t close to ready for college. For example, only 54 percent of L.A.’s high school students graduate. Only 39 percent of students in grades 2-11 were proficient in math. And one-third of third graders read at grade level.

Testing data

This disconnection exists beyond Los Angeles. And the gap is why reformers are trying to include testing data in reviews.

Deasy spoke with the passion of a civil rights reformer when he said recently that he doesn’t have bad days. The people having bad days, he believes, are those L.A. students who are stuck in classes with ineffective teachers.

School board members in cities like Dallas should remember that point. Dallas’ district pioneered a model in the 1990s that uses student scores in reviewing teachers. But too many board members have shied from enforcing it.

Some teachers think reformers don’t get it. Kids show up unprepared for the day and they come from troubled homes.

I agree, all the way around.

But these new models include data that shows how much “value” a teacher adds to a child during a year. Their students could fail the state’s achievement test, but the teachers will get credit for, say, bringing them up more than a grade level.

That’s fair.

William McKenzie is an editorial columnist for The Dallas Morning News. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.