Today's question of the day comes from the Sacramento Bee in this article about the STAR score release. The question and answer section they included this question:

Should Californians be concerned about a 50 percent proficiency rate?

To answer their question..... YES! Yes, California taxpayers and parents should be concerned about the fact that only about half of our students are at grade-level each year. If we continued to gain 2 percentage points a year (the amount of this year's gain) it would take us more than 20 years to get almost all of our students to grade-level. That's a whole generation of our students. Read the rest of this post!

Probably the biggest story in education this week is the value-added analysis done by the Los Angeles Times looking at the impact of individual teachers on student academic performance.

Though the government spends billions of dollars every year on education, relatively little of the money has gone to figuring out which teachers are effective and why.

Seeking to shed light on the problem, The Times obtained seven years of math and English test scores from the Los Angeles Unified School District and used the information to estimate the effectiveness of L.A. teachers — something the district could do but has not.

The Times used a statistical approach known as 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.

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

In coming months, The Times will publish a series of articles and a database analyzing individual teachers' effectiveness in the nation's second-largest school district — the first time, experts say, such information has been made public anywhere in the country.

This article examines the performance of more than 6,000 third- through fifth-grade teachers for whom reliable data were available.

The Los Angeles Times is creating a database of their findings so that parents can look up the teachers in their neighborhood school and see which class they want their child to be in. They also shared some general findings: Read the rest of this post!

I thought this op ed by Jane Hathaway in the USA Today was an interesting perspective on teacher evaluation.

Washington, D.C., is front and center taking on the challenge. For decades here and in school districts coast to coast, seniority provided what seemed to be a fair, transparent and moderately efficient layoff strategy. Years in the classroom can be counted with little dispute. Districts viewed teachers as largely interchangeable, and students were presumed to be largely untouched by personnel matters.

If anything, more experienced teachers — those protected by seniority — were assumed to be better than younger instructors. Meanwhile, greater employment security rewarded loyal employees, no doubt fostering good management and teacher relations. It all worked smoothly.

That was then. Today, things are different. Thanks to more and better data about individual students and teachers, we can base policies on a truer understanding of what goes on in schools.

We know, because of research from the federally funded National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) — and elsewhere, that the differences in teacher effectiveness, as measured by tested student achievement gains, are huge. Strong teachers get nearly triple the results that weak teachers get with their students.

So which teachers stay and which leave matters.

I've noticed that increasingly schools are touting their college-going rates as proof of their students' success. Unfortunately, the percentage of students going to college doesn't really tell you all that much. With a little effort, any student can get accepted into a California Community College, which are prevented by law from turning students away. Even if you limit the statistic to students going to 4-year colleges, it still comes down to whether the student and their parents were willing and able to make the effort to apply to enough institutions to get the student accepted.

I thought this USA Today opinion piece by Virginia high school teacher Patrick Walsh did a good job of explaining some of my concerns.

Three weeks ago, the school system in Alexandria, Va., announced that 80% of the students who were about to graduate from T.C. Williams High School would be going on to college. That's an impressive statistic for a school that is 79% minority, with more than half its kids on a free or reduced-cost lunch program. But when one looks at just what "going on to college" means nowadays — and what it will mean a couple of years from now — we might do well to restrain our applause.

I had great students in my senior English classes this year — kids accepted to Yale, Columbia, the University of Virginia, Wesleyan and other highly competitive colleges and universities. But I also had other seniors whom I still feel guilty about passing, and they, too, are among the 80% whom we boast about going to college.

In fact, it seemed to me that many of our staff beat the bushes to send as many warm bodies as they could on to higher education regardless of whether the students had the skills or motivation to do rudimentary high school work. T.C. Williams is not alone in this drive to move everyone on to college. A new study from the Pew Research Center reports that "freshman enrollment at the nation's 6,100 post-secondary institutions surged by 144,000 students from the fall of 2007 to the fall of 2008. This 6% increase was the largest in 40 years, and almost three-quarters of it came from minority freshman."

The trend is certainly a boon to the education establishment. High schools like mine, always eager for good press, can boast that they have prepared an ever greater percentage of their charges to move on to the halls of academe. And though colleges blame us in the high schools for sending them kids who are woefully unprepared, they blithely pocket the tuition from such students lest they have to downsize and lay off professors and administrators.

But how much students with low skills, little motivation and lousy study habits are going to profit from going to college is not so clear. Over the past five years, I have seen students who didn't have the skills one would expect of a ninth-grader going off to four-year colleges where fewer than 30% of entering freshman graduate.

That means that 70% of the freshman class is likely to end up not with a diploma but a pile of debt. In these days of tight budgets at every level of government, it's also hard to ignore that these schools are heavily subsidized by the federal government.

While T.C. Williams boasts about the 80% going on to college, it makes no effort to track what happens to these kids.

Somehow I missed this Washington Post opinion piece by first-year, second-career high school teacher Michelle Kerr. Fortunately, Coach Brown mentioned it and so I was able to read it.

I think one of the problems with teacher evaluations is that there is disagreement over whether teaching can actually be measured. I've heard educators insist that great teaching is like the Supreme Court's definition of pornography: It is difficult to define, but you know it when you see it. I also think that a key question is whether you're measuring the inputs or the outputs. Is it good teaching if the teacher does and outstanding job of doing everything just right and yet students don't master the material? Is it good teaching if a teachers uses an unorthodox strategy which has great success in getting students to learn the material?

I believe you must look at the output... are the students mastering the material. Good teaching that doesn't achieve that is merely entertaining performance art.

Ms. Kerr's suggestion is that you use student performance to measure good teaching, but she includes four caveats:

1. Teachers be assessed based on only those students with 90 percent or higher attendance.
2. Teachers be allowed to remove disruptive students from their classroom on a day-to-day basis.
3. Students who don't achieve "basic" proficiency in a state test be prohibited from moving forward to the next class in the progression.
4. That teachers be assessed on student improvement, not an absolute standard -- the so-called value-added assessment.