Teacher evaluation report criticized
The president of the Louisiana Federation of Teachers on Thursday criticized a report that said linking job evaluations for public school teachers to student achievement is a good indicator of how effective teachers will be in the future.
LFT President Steve Monaghan said other studies have disputed the value of the ratings, which Louisiana is launching in the current school year.
Trying to gauge a teacher’s role in student test scores is called value added.
“The jury is still out on how well the value added model judges teacher effectiveness,” Monaghan said in a prepared statement.
The report was done by Marcus Winters, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
The study said value added “can be a useful piece of a comprehensive evaluation system,” and complaints that it is invalid should be rejected.
Under Louisiana’s plan, half of a teacher’s evaluation will be linked to the growth of student achievement and half to classroom observations. Teachers who get back-to-back poor reviews face dismissal proceedings.
The LFT and the Louisiana Association of Educators, the state’s other major teachers’ union, opposed the measure, which the Legislature approved in 2010.
The LFT said a report by the Annenberg Institute at Brown University questioned whether value added should serve as a primary method of teacher evaluations.
Monaghan also criticized how the Louisiana plan was crafted by the state Department of Education. “The department has stonewalled all efforts to discover just how their model was devised,” Monaghan said.