Test shows BR teachers top in La.

Advocate staff photo by HEATHER MCCLELLAND -- East Baton Rouge Parish School Board member Jill Dyason on Thursday asks a question during a discussion of how parish teachers fared on a 2011-12 pilot of a portion of the state's new teacher evaluation system.

Teachers in East Baton Rouge Parish during the 2011-12 school year performed better than their peers in the rest of Louisiana during a test run of the state’s new teacher evaluation system, specifically the part that relies solely on student standardized test scores.

In a presentation Thursday night to the parish School Board, Liz Frischhertz, chief accountability officer for the school system, summarized the results from the “2011-12 Value Added Model Pilot.”

More than 10 percent of East Baton Rouge Parish teachers participating were judged “highly effective” compared with less than 9 percent statewide. Less than 4 percent of parish teachers ranked in the bottom “ineffective” category; double that number, more than 8 percent, were rated “ineffective” statewide.

“We’re ahead in the categories we want to be ahead in,” Frischhertz said.

She said the results confirm that the school system employs many good teachers.

After the presentation, Frischhertz said the model follows a bell curve, which under a normal distribution, you would expect 10 percent of teachers to be “highly effective” and 10 percent to be “ineffective.” She cautioned that it’s just a pilot study and the results could have a notable margin of error.

The pilot study dealt with teachers whose students took state standardized tests in grades four to eight and took Algebra 1 and geometry in the ninth grade.

Using a complicated formula, students are judged by whether students earn the equivalent of a year’s worth of academic growth in a year’s time or better.

The growth is judged as the “value added” by the teacher to a student’s learning, once a variety of factors are controlled for.

Frischhertz said the teachers who participated in the pilot represent about 20 percent of teachers on the job in the school system. Value-added scores could not be generated for a small number of teachers who were otherwise eligible for the study, such as those who had fewer than 10 students in their classes.

It wasn’t clear Thursday how many districts participated in the value-added pilot study. The state Department of Education website said 20 of Louisiana’s 70 school districts participated in the pilot, including some charter schools, but an accompanying list named only 18 participating districts.

Barry Landry, a spokesman for the state Department of Education, said he’s not aware of any plans to release more results from the pilot.

Frischhertz said that at her request back in August the state sent her the results for East Baton Rouge Parish and for all of the participating districts collectively, but that’s it.

“I would like to be able to see results for individual parishes so we could compare,” she said.

Other results for East Baton Rouge Parish teachers from the pilot study show that more than 61 percent of parish teachers were in the top two categories of “highly effective” and “effective proficient,” compared to just more than 50 percent statewide.

Starting in 2013-14, low results on the new evaluation system could be grounds for a teacher losing tenure or being fired.

Comments

1) Comment by iluvbtr - 05/10/2012

Blaming Teachers is NOT the Answer: Right now there are more first year teachers in America than there are people with any experience. We have been driving away good teachers and experienced teachers with all of this negative trash talk about teachers and we should stop it now and begin to talk about how to have a positive approach. First of all giving respect to teachers, that’s the least we should do, and secondly just to recognize that they have a really, really hard job and to give them the support and resources that they need to do their job. There is a large body of research by testing experts warning that it is wrong to judge teacher quality by student test scores and that these measures are considered inaccurate and unstable, that a teacher may be labeled effective one year, then ineffective the next one? These measures may be strongly influenced by the composition of a teacher’s classroom, over which she or he has no control? Do you think there is a long line of excellent teachers waiting to replace those who are (in many cases, wrongly) fired? The U.S. Department of Education's Schools and Staffing Survey which show that the modal years of teaching experience in 1987-88 was 15: in the latest published survey, 2007-08, the modal years of experience was one. That means that in 2008 there were more teachers in their first year of teaching than any other group. This is frightening. What sane nation would want to lose its experienced teachers and rely increasingly on newcomers? The teaching profession is traumatized by our current policies resulting in the most experienced and skilled practitioners being turned off from the profession by data-driven politicians Of course, teachers should be evaluated, but they should be evaluated by knowledgeable professionals—their supervisors and peers. Of course, incompetent teachers should be fired, but first they should have a chance to improve. If they can't improve, they don't belong in the classroom. What is happening is that the teaching profession will become the least desirable for any bright, capable and idealistic student which will result in the further intellectual impoverishment of public schools. The entire choice/testing/merit-pay scam has its roots in the desire of profit- making private entrepreneurs to get their hands on your tax money from federal and state sources. Transferring control of public dollars to private hands is not reform. It is privatization. This strikes at the very heart of public education. It is a mirage. Louisiana needs to do the right thing and support a sound public education system that benefits the children of the rising generation. The need for true educational reform, however, whether "traditional" or "innovative," is compelling because Louisiana needs a larger proportion of well-educated people than we have now, not only so we can compete globally, but for the preservation of a democratic society; a society that is not easily led by the half-truths and lies that pass for political discourse. We need an informed citizenry that will be skeptical in believing that the "free market" holds the solution to every economic problem. We need an educated citizenry that has the reasoning power to distinguish rumor and innuendo from fact and has the intellectual tools to pick apart the simplistic rhetoric that passes for political discourse. We need a focused public that demands reasoned proposals to address our present challenges. Why is it that politicians don’t pay attention to research and studies? "This is the time for direct action."

2) Comment by iluvbtr - 05/10/2012

High-Stakes Testing and the Value-Added Proposition: We are living through a movement in which schooling is being radically re-envisioned as a private rather than a public enterprise, with little debate over whether the ideology of the free market belongs in American schools in the first place. The Governor and other proponents of the movement see standardized tests as a way to evaluate student and teacher performance. Testing has its uses—in theory, it’s one of the most useful tools for figuring out “this child really needs more time with fractions, this one needs more time understanding this concept or that concept in science or history”—but too many education reformers have come to see test scores as the goal of learning, rather than as an instrument for assessing student understanding. Test scores are not being used for diagnostic purposes but as a clumsy and myopic way to evaluate (and penalize) Louisiana schools, teachers, and students. As pay is increasingly tied to improving test scores, and the noose between teacher pay and student test scores is tightened, teachers who want to give their students a richer diet than test prep are facing the prospect of losing their jobs if they follow their moral and professional principles. Teachers would love to "stop teaching to the test," but current policies make test scores the measure of every teacher. If teachers stop teaching the test their students might not get higher test scores every year, and teachers might be fired, and their schools might be closed. When teachers are compelled to teach the test, students aren’t learning about the world; they’re not learning about different cultures, learning about science, learning about math. All they are learning about is how to fill out a little bubble on an exam and the little tricks that you need to do in order to take a test.

3) Comment by Tea_Slayer - 05/10/2012

localgal, real all of Mr hammatt's post. For instance: "Now we find that the state's own "value-added" scores show our teachers outperform the state average (by far) on student growth. Now, let me point out something. The state's "value-added" scores are not worth the paper they are printed on. (By the way, the Department of Education has NEVER released the formula itself... I guess it is TOP SECRET.) School Performance Scores SPS or "Letter Grades, also have no relationship with the quality of teaching."

4) Comment by localgal - 05/10/2012

Noel, it should be fairly easy for EBR to accomplish the stats in this article. So many of the schools here are doing very poorly. We have how many schools graded as either C,D, or F? It didn't take too much for many of the teachers to reach the benchmark under the new evaluation. I would predict that other poorly rated school systems will have their teachers faring the same because they had so far to go to pull their schools up to an A or a B. Those stats don't prove anything. Look at that poor school in Sheveport mentioned in another article. They are the top elementary school in the state, yet the teachers there risk being ruled ineffective. I would be curious to know how well the teachers at magnet schools here in the parish were represented. They are probably going to face the same problem as the school in Shreveport. Which 20% of teachers were sampled? Of course the state doesn't want to release any more stats by individual parish because they will have to admit that this whole "reform"is a total joke! The entire system is corrupt. The only way to evaluate teachers is to get solid, qualified principals to do what they used to do---get into the classroom and observe your teachers on a regular basis. Now they have no time to check on the teachers in their own schools. Neither do all the high paid supervisors at the local level. They have become glorified paper pushers. Free them from the endless paperwork, get the federal government out of our hair and quit forcing states to compete for funds for their state schools. Abolish the U.S. Department of Education. Give us back our local schools.

5) Comment by Noel Hammatt - 05/10/2012

Simply amazing, isn't it? So many aspects of this story. EBR, constantly being assailed as a "D" district, while it's students perform above the state national average on the ACT test (when looking at comparisons of White, African-American and Asian students compared to their state-wide an national peer groups) and recognized in the Schott report a couple of years ago as having one of the highest graduation rates for African-American students in the entire country. In the last year we have data for, White students in EBR scored fifth highest in the state. (For the nay-sayers out there who spent all their money bashing the school system in the last School Board elections, please go look up "Simpson's Paradox.") Now we find that the state's own "value-added" scores show our teachers outperform the state average (by far) on student growth. Now, let me point out something. The state's "value-added" scores are not worth the paper they are printed on. (By the way, the Department of Education has NEVER released the formula itself... I guess it is TOP SECRET.) School Performance Scores SPS or "Letter Grades, also have no relationship with the quality of teaching. None. Neither Letter Grades nor "Value Added Measures" (VAM) are legitimate measures of anything at all! And again, I am offering to debate anyone who claims otherwise, at a time and place (public) of their choosing. Only one rule. Any claims must be supported with evidence. And, any state claims must include the actual DATA! The state has consistently refused to allow researchers access top any of the state data. Interesting to note that again we have a district asking for data from the state, and being refused. Any media out there having any luck? Or are they running into a "legal" roadblock thrown up by the state? Would love to see more charter school data. For now, it looks like the state is not going to release data on many of its own RSD schools. What are they hiding? More on this is sure to come!