Posted on 05/08/2011 3:36:06 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
....The Los Angeles Unified School District superintendent and other civic leaders, in a letter to the newspaper's publisher, recently asked The Times to reconsider publishing the ratings, saying in part that individual teachers' performances should be addressed in private conversations.
More than 1,000 teachers responded to The Times' invitation to view their scores before publication, but few took the opportunity to write comments alongside their ratings. Instructors were strongly advised not to do so by their union, United Teachers Los Angeles, which has opposed publication of the ratings. Some of those who did comment said they saw the information as valuable but added that it did not reflect the sum total of their performance...
Others denounced the newspaper, calling its statistics "invalid" and its ratings "a scarlet letter."
"Once again you have violated the right to privacy of thousands of teachers," wrote Patricia Hill, who has taught at Windsor Hills Math Science Aerospace Magnet School.
.....The model used by the district, which is seeking to persuade the union to include the ratings in formal teacher evaluations, is broadly similar to the one adopted by The Times. But The Times analyzed seven years of data, while the district analyzed up to four. The district and The Times adjusted the data to control for slightly different variables.
In addition, the civic leaders wrote that individual teacher evaluations should be conducted privately for the purpose of helping teachers improve.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
Once again you have violated the right to privacy of thousands of teachers,” wrote Patricia Hill, who has taught at Windsor Hills Math Science Aerospace Magnet School.
They are PUBLIC school teachers...being paid by the PUBLIC...why so bent out of shape to show the PUBLIC how you rate?...any other boss is privy to his employee’s performance ratings.
(Once again you have violated the right to privacy of thousands of teachers,” wrote Patricia Hill, who has taught)
1. You are a PUBLIC employee
2. You are paid with OUR tax dollars
3. You teach OUR children
There is nothing private about that.
If you took that much money to accomplish so little, wouldn't you want to keep it secret? Besides, the right to privacy is right there in the Constitution (check the penumbra), and it is the highest of all our rights, just ask any liberal.
Can you just imagine what it is like to be sent into one of these indoctrination mills?
This isn’t education.
But we’re damn well paying for it.
Besides our federal tax dollars being doled out to keep the federal government in the loop of control, 50% of all states’ budgets are spent on education.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe that California ranks last in the USA in student scores. And I believe that County of Los Angeles ranks last in the state of California. Imagine delivering a child of yours into a hellish situation like that!
I do not know who ranks where but I do know the unions and their political benefactors are doing everything they can to keep us from knowing how truly awful it is.
They just want us to keep slapping those “My Child is a “superstar” at.....,” My Child is on the Honor Roll,” stickers on our cars and building new schools to house this insanity in pretty packaging.
It’s all marketing.
“Many experts say it’s not enough for a value-added approach simply to compare a student’s performance to that in previous years—one must adjust for other factors such as race and ethnicity...”
What “many experts” are saying, then, is that the ability to learn varies directly with race, ethnicity, and family income. Note that the metric is not how much the student knows, but rather how much the student has improved as a result of being in a teacher’s class. So, in order to protect the unionized incompetents we call “teachers” in the government schools, the ed establishment is taking a hard hereditarian line based on race. In other words, they are saying that “those blacks, hispanics and children from low income families can’t learn, so don’t blame us”.
Homeschool studies show rather conclusively that economic status doesn’t materially affect academic achievement (note that this a tougher standard than merely “value added”). Indications also are that race and ethnicity don’t make much difference. Catholic schools have also done a better job with “troubled urban youth” than government school.
Could it be that the problem is the very model of government education with its leftist ideological orientation, unions, and the overpaid simpletons who tend to work in the system?
They’ll all say they rank last or close to last if anyone suggests failing to increase their budgets or reducing them.
Once again you have violated the right to privacy of thousands of teachers”
You don’t understand. They have a “right” to have their incompetence kept private. I hope that helps.
...and language spoken at home.
Thank you for clearing that up for me :)
The copy writers at the Los Angeles Times finally corrected the headline of this article.
It now reads:
“.......Los Angeles elementary school teachers” vs the earlier “....Long Angeles elementary school teachers”
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