An education activist in Dallas is suing his local school district in an attempt to force them to release the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS) results, among others, at the classroom level. Activist Russell Fish believes these results will show the public how well - or how poorly - certain instructors are teaching. The school district, which vehemently opposes releasing scores, claims that to do so would violate student privacy. Interestingly, Mr. Fish has the NAACP on his side:
Legal experts say that if Mr. Fish's suit is successful, it could be used as a precedent to open up performance data on teachers all over the state.
A Dallas County jury is to hear the case in state district court. The issue revolves around thousands of computerized student test scores on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, one of several tests DISD gives students to assess their knowledge of math, reading and other core subjects. The NAACP joined Mr. Fish as co-plaintiff in the lawsuit because it wants to know more about teacher quality in poor and mostly black DISD schools.
Mr. Fish, 50, is a retired electrical engineer and volunteer tutor. He also calls himself an "education activist." He says he has been using school district computer records to track public education in Texas for more than a decade...
Mr. Fish claims that the school district fears public knowledge of teacher quality. He also claims that the district's charge that students can be identified from the data is bunkum (and I have a tendency to agree, if the data are released with identifiers rather than names). Teachers, on the other hand, are legally able to be put in the spotlight, according to Mr. Fish's counsel.
What data are we talking about here? The Value-Added Teacher Assessment (usually called VAT), in which teachers are linked with test-score gains made by their students over some time period, usually a couple of years. The theory behind VAT is the opposite of what our hapless Mr. Alford claimed yesterday; VAT states that teacher quality is the critical variable in student educational gains, with race, SES, gender, and so on falling a distant second in the amount of impact.
The article gives a good description of VAT, so I won't go into all of it here. Suffice it to say that schools intended the data to be seen only by administrators and the teachers involved, for the purpose of "internal discussions." Texas releases a lot of other state-, district-, and school-level data, but has traditionally drawn the line at teacher-level data:
The thought of holding teachers publicly accountable for their own classroom test scores summons up a variety of fears among critics who say public schools already place too much emphasis on high-stakes testing. They argue that many variables other than "teacher quality" intrude on test scores and that it's unfair to focus so much attention on the instructor.
"If you are going to publish teacher rankings, then also publish the heroics and beautiful things that teachers do to ennoble our youngsters," said Dr. Erika Karres, an education consultant and former teacher in New York. "You can't consider teachers and students as machines that you can gauge by an input-output industrial model."
Dr. Karres doth protest too much. We know that teachers are more than their test scores; on the other hand, a teacher whose "heroics" leaves students lagging behind when it comes to performance on objective measures is not doing his or her students any favors, no matter how "beautifully" they may be doing it.
The district and Mr. Fish wholeheartedly agree that a couple of years of ineffective teaching can have devastating effects on a child's school performance. Where they part ways is in the decision to hold that knowledge confidential, or release it to the public. Be interesting to see how this turns out.
Mr. Fish has a theory. He says public education used to be "a sacred trust" run by very smart women whose career opportunities were limited to teaching, nursing and a few other professions. "They firmly believed in their bones that they had been placed on earth to impart knowledge to boys and girls," he says.
As new careers opened to women, the best and brightest no longer went into teaching. College training programs gradually lowered their admission and graduation standards, diminishing the overall quality of teachers, especially for poor and minority children.
Now, he says, is the time to rate teachers based on a statistical analysis of the value they add to student learning...
Clayton Trotter, Mr. Fish's attorney...argues that even-handed public policy should require teachers to be treated the same as police officers, firefighters and other publicly funded professionals whose personnel records are mostly classified as open records. In Texas, state law specifically prohibits public disclosure of a teacher's annual performance review.
Posted by kswygert at September 30, 2003 11:25 AM