Washington, DC–Recently, the U.S. Department of Education opened the School Turnaround Learning Community (STLC)  to the public, offering a wealth of resources and networking opportunities to educators throughout the country. The STLC is a collaboration platform that enables educators to share success stories, learn from colleagues throughout the country, and inform the Department with their expertise. Currently, the STLC has 4300 subscribed members, provides approximately 500 turnaround school resources, facilitates eight discussion boards, and has hosted nearly 60 webinars on various topics including teacher and leader effectiveness,increased learning time, and community and parent engagement.

According to the STLC site, “The goal of the STLC is to provide states and districts with easy online access to resources and to facilitate networking that will enable them to support schools more effectively…. Both research-based practices and practical examples from states, districts, and schools inventing on-the-ground solutions are available. The purpose of the STLC is to provide one-stop access to these resources and to promote and facilitate sharing across states and districts to deepen learning over time.”

If you are working to support school turnaround, you may want to take a moment to join the School Turnaround Learning Community (STLC) and their two active groups, Increased Learning Time and Teacher Effectiveness.  Once you join, visit the My Account page and click on the Notifications tab to set your preferences for receiving updates on activity in the online STLC.

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OAKLAND, CA (January 12, 2012) – Today, The Education Trust—West releases the findings of a two- year-long study of data from the second largest school district in the nation, revealing profound inequities in access to effective teaching.  In Learning Denied: The Case for Equitable Access to Effective Teaching in California’s Largest School District, The Education Trust—West finds that low-income students and students of color in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) are less likely to be taught by the district’s top teachers – the very teachers capable of closing the district’s achievement gaps. These inequities are exacerbated by teacher mobility patterns and quality-blind layoffs.

“This is one of the largest and most comprehensive analyses of this type ever completed, accounting for over 17,500 teachers and more than a million students,” said report co-author Carrie Hahnel, Director of Policy and Research at The Education Trust—West. “We were able to quantify the impact of effective teachers on student learning. We looked at the extent to which students of color and students in poverty had access to effective teachers, and we also looked at the impact of quality-blind teacher layoffs.”

The report reveals that:

• Teachers have the potential to dramatically accelerate the learning of their students – with the average student taught by a top 25% teacher (top quartile in terms of value-added) gaining half a year more of learning in English-Language Arts and four months in math than a student placed with a teacher in the bottom 25% (bottom quartile).
• Second-graders who started off behind academically and then had three top quartile teachers accelerated to academic proficiency, while students with consecutive bottom quartile  teachers remained stuck below grade level.
• Commonly used measures of teacher quality, such as years of experience, are poor predictors of effectiveness in the classroom. While teachers do improve over time, the differences among teachers are far greater than those between teachers at different levels of experience.  For example, the difference between a 10th-year teacher and first-year teacher is only about three and a half weeks in ELA and two and a half weeks in math.
• Effective teachers are inequitably distributed in LAUSD with Latino, African-American and low-income students much less likely to have access to top-quartile teachers. In addition, these top teachers are more likely to leave the district’s highest need schools.
• Quality-blind teacher layoffs in 2009 resulted in the removal of high value-added teachers from the highest need schools. If the district had instead laid off teachers based on effectiveness, only about 5 percent of the ELA teachers and 3 percent of the math teachers actually cut by LAUSD would have been laid off.

The report reveals that a low-income student is more than twice as likely to have a low value-added ELA teacher as a higher income peer, and 66 percent more likely to have a low-value added math teacher.  Latino and African-American students are two to three times more likely to have bottom-quartile teachers in math and ELA, respectively, than their white and Asian peers.

According to the report, state and local policies can prevent students from accessing the most effective teachers or cause students to lose access to these teachers. The report recommends that district and state leaders invest in high-quality evaluation systems to identify effective teachers and those who are failing to improve student performance. It calls for developing programs and policies that attract and retain the best teachers in the highest need schools, offering teachers the high-quality professional development that leads to gains in student achievement, and fundamentally reforming state policies that prevent local leaders from making decisions in the best interests of students. This includes ending once and for all quality-blind, “last in, first out” (LIFO) teacher layoffs.

The goal of California GEAR UP is to develop and sustain the organizational capacity of middle schools to prepare all students for high school and higher education through a statewide network of support for adults who influence middle school students, specifically their counselors, faculty, school leaders and families.  As a result of this expanded capacity, a higher proportion of students, particularly from backgrounds and communities that have not historically pursued a college education, will enroll and succeed in higher education.

To read the full report, click through to the Ed Trust West website HERE.

The Education Trust—West, a California GEAR UP Partner, works for the high academic achievement of all students at all levels, pre-k through college. They expose opportunity and achievement gaps that separate students of color and low-income students from other youth, and identify and advocate for the strategies that will forever close those gaps.

Teacher ‘effectiveness’ is the topic of what has become a very controversial article in the August 14 issue of the Los Angeles Times. Seven years worth of math and English data was obtained and analyzed from Los Angeles Unified School District using a statistical approach called ‘value added analysis’ which rates teachers based on their students’ progress on standardized tests from year to year. Each student’s performance is compared with his or her own in past years, which largely controls for outside influences often blamed for academic failure: poverty, prior learning and other factors.

The LA Times analysis includes a teacher data ‘lookup’ where teachers can find their value added score and comment on it. Data includes performance on more than 6,000 third to fifth grade teachers for whom reliable data was available.

Though controversial among teachers and others, the method has been increasingly embraced by education leaders and policymakers across the country, including the Obama administration.

“You’re leading people in a dangerous direction, making it seem like you can judge the quality of a teacher by … a test,” said A.J. Duffy, president of United Teachers Los Angeles, which has more than 40,000 members.

Among the findings:

• Highly effective teachers routinely propel students from below grade level to advanced in a single year.
• Contrary to popular belief, the best teachers were not concentrated in schools in the most affluent neighborhoods, nor were the weakest instructors bunched in poor areas.
• Parents obsess about picking the right school for their child, but it matters far more which teacher the child gets.
• Many of the factors commonly assumed to be important to teachers’ effectiveness were not. Although teachers are paid more for experience, education and training, none of this had much bearing on whether they improved their students’ performance.

Today the United Teachers of Los Angeles announced a massive boycott of the LA Times for what they are calling a flawed article. Flaws include:

• Value-Added Models exacerbate the overreliance on standardized test scores.
• Value-Added Models rest on a faulty premise—that high-stakes standardized student test scores can measure a teacher’s effectiveness.
• VAM is another example of a “quick fix” that some policymakers embrace instead of doing the harder work of pursuing long-term solutions for public education.

“Ms. Caruso was an amazing teacher,” said Rita Gasparetti, whose daughter was in Caruso’s class a few years ago. “She really worked with Clara, socially and academically.”

Still, Caruso said the numbers were important and, like several other teachers interviewed, wondered why she hadn’t been shown such data before by anyone in the district.

“For better or worse,” she said, “testing and teacher effectiveness are going to be linked.… If my student test scores show I’m an ineffective teacher, I’d like to know what contributes to it. What do I need to do to bring my average up?”

Until now access to the VAM data has not been available. In what appears to be a long and incendiary discussion of the effectiveness of schools, teachers, and education as a whole, the value added model is another interesting component of an increasingly complex conversation.

For the full article click here.

Have you read the article? What do you think?