No, not yet.
Since assuming office, President Obama has accomplished two of three pledges regarding public education. He has successfully encouraged states to adopt common national standards. He has successfully encouraged states to adopt common standard assessments. Yet left undone is his pledge to rewrite No Child Left Behind from an outcome-based model to a value-added model. If and when he does, VAM will be an appropriate component of teacher evaluations, in that district staffs, school staffs, and teachers will all be playing by - and being held accountable to - the same rules. Until then, we should not confuse matters - and stakeholders - by substituting contradictory student data for no student data in teacher evaluations.
Yes, in a word.
Finally, multiple measures are essential in teacher evaluation, and these should include teacher attendance, teacher participation in the life of the school, student and parent interest in having this teacher, and so on.
Readers of my blog, Taking Note, know that I spoke out in favor of the LA Times’ decision to make public the names of teachers whose students have shown consistent change, either positive or negative, but I qualified my remarks to stress that equal or greater attention should be paid to the administrators who must have been aware of this and did nothing about it.
Teachers whose students consistently lose ground and who have been given opportunities to improve—but haven’t--should be ‘outed’, assuming attention is paid to the caveats above. And administrators who have failed to intervene should be held accountable. Kids do not get a mulligan when it comes to grades, and a lost year is a lost year. That’s indisputable.
