L.A. TEACHERS FACE NEW EVALUATIONS

By ERICA E. PHILLIPS and STEPHANIE BANCHERO, The Wall Street Journal |  http://on.wsj.com/MvIIUL

Michal Czerwonka for The Wall Street Journal

June 14, 2012, 8:27 p.m. ET   ::  Los Angeles teacher April Bain says she backs using tests to evaluate teachers, something her union opposes.

In the past three years, at least 30 states have begun to use student achievement to evaluate teachers, spurred in part by President Barack Obama's Race to the Top education initiative as well as by some Republican governors. California isn't one of them.

That could change after a ruling by a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge. At a hearing Tuesday, Judge James Chalfant said the Los Angeles Unified School District, one of the nation's largest, violated California's Stull Act, a 41-year-old law that requires teacher evaluations to take into consideration the performance of students.

The current evaluation system in Los Angeles focuses on teaching methods, such as how a teacher demonstrates knowledge or guides instruction, according to the district.

In his ruling, Judge Chalfant contrasted the high rate of positive teacher evaluations in the district—97.6 in the 2009-10 school year—with low student proficiency in English and math.

"These failures cannot be laid solely at the feet of the District's teachers," the judge wrote. "But the District has an obligation to look at any and all means available to help improve the dismal results of its student population."

The ruling is a victory for the anonymous group of parents and students who last fall sued the LAUSD for the changes. It also is a win for the district's superintendent, John Deasy, who has been pushing the teachers' union to accept a new evaluation system that includes student performance on standardized tests. "In many ways, we were tremendously affirmed by the judge's decision," Mr. Deasy said.

The union generally opposes using standardized tests for teacher evaluation, especially if the results could be used to fire teachers.

Some Los Angeles teachers welcomed the ruling. April Bain, a math teacher at Downtown Magnets High School, said she was "flabbergasted" the district rates teachers without considering student achievement and hopes the decision will force it to add student test data to evaluations.

"I think it will make me a better teacher because it will make the evaluations more meaningful, and put more teeth behind them," Ms. Bain said.

An advocacy group called EdVoice, which gets support from Los Angeles billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad, backed the students and parents who sued the district.

The fight in Los Angeles is a microcosm of a national debate over using student tests to evaluate teachers. Research has shown that the quality of the teacher is one of the main drivers of student achievement.

As U.S. public-school pupils have fallen further behind peers around the globe, states and districts have begun using test scores to evaluate teachers and grant them tenure.

The judge's ruling is believed to be the first to order a California district to follow the parts of the Stull Act that call for teacher evaluations based on student achievement. It is likely to reverberate throughout the state.

"What happens in Los Angeles sets the stage for what happens in other districts," said Arun Ramanathan, executive director of Education Trust-West, a nonprofit that advocates for low-income and minority children.

Critics of the move say state-developed exams aren't nuanced enough to judge teacher quality. States struggle to find ways to grade teachers in untested subjects such as art and music. Some parents complain the movement has led to more tests for children, which take up valuable instruction time.

Judge Chalfant is expected to sign the judgment and final order, which the petitioners are drafting, at a hearing in late July. Bill Lucia, chief executive of EdVoice, said his group will push the district to show it is in the process of full compliance by Sept. 1 and that, by the end of the 2012-13 school year, all teacher evaluations include student-achievement data.

The judge's decision allows for a range of methods for evaluating teachers tied to student performance, including grade-point averages and pass-fail rates.

Mr. Deasy said he hopes the decision will compel the district to accelerate adoption of a new evaluation system it has been trying out among several hundred teachers and administrators this year. United Teachers Los Angeles, the local teachers' union, opposed that program, saying the student-performance measures it uses—standardized test scores over time—were unreliable.

"As educators we don't want to introduce something into the process that's going to have the outcome of narrowing the curriculum and really degrading the value of an education," said Warren Fletcher, the union's president.

Mr. Fletcher said that in light of Tuesday's ruling, the union will address evaluations as part of the collective-bargaining process, "in a way that doesn't skip the bargaining step and requires that the resolution be arrived at mutually by management and the teachers."

A lawyer for the petitioners said the district has to comply with the Stull Act. "You may have to bargain with the union about how you come into compliance, but that doesn't mean you can get around the minimum the law requires," said Scott J. Witlin of Barnes & Thornburg LLP.

—Alexandra Berzon contributed to this article.

 

A version of this article appeared June 15, 2012, on page A6 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: L.A. Teachers Face New Evaluations.