Daily Archives: August 15, 2010

Education

L. A. Times uses value-added analysis to rate public school teachers

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Public school students are graded and tested all the time. Schools are scored too — California rates them in an annual index.

Not so with teachers.

Nationally, the vast majority who seek tenure get it after a few years on the job, practically ensuring a position for life. After that, pay and job protections depend mostly on seniority, not performance.

That’s from The Los Angeles Times, which recently published a fascinating article about evaluating teachers (read it here). They used a statistical method known as “value-added analysis” to rate teacher effectiveness in Los Angeles public schools. They explained that, “Value-added analysis offers a rigorous approach. In essence, a student’s past performance on tests is used to project his or her future results. The difference between the prediction and the student’s actual performance after a year is the ‘value’ that the teacher added or subtracted.”

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.[…]

Among the findings:

  • Highly effective teachers routinely propel students from below grade level to advanced in a single year. There is a substantial gap at year’s end between students whose teachers were in the top 10% in effectiveness and the bottom 10%. The fortunate students ranked 17 percentile points higher in English and 25 points higher in math.

  • Some students landed in the classrooms of the poorest-performing instructors year after year — a potentially devastating setback that the district could have avoided. Over the period analyzed, more than 8,000 students got such a math or English teacher at least twice in a row.

  • 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. Rather, these teachers were scattered throughout the district. The quality of instruction typically varied far more within a school than between schools.

  • Although many parents fixate on picking the right school for their child, it matters far more which teacher the child gets. Teachers had three times as much influence on students’ academic development as the school they attend. Yet parents have no access to objective information about individual instructors, and they often have little say in which teacher their 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.

I highly recommend reading the whole article. A question for teachers and administrators who read my blog: what do you think of value-added analysis, and using this as a tool to evaluate teachers? The article concedes that it should not be the sole method of evaluation, but suggests that it would be beneficial if it made up 30-50% of a teacher’s review.

City Council, City of Peoria, Museum Block, Peoria County

County told State it already owns land for museum

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In April, Peoria County applied for a $5 million grant through the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity (DCEO). A copy of the grant application was acquired from the County:

DCEO Grant Survey – Peoria Riverfront Museum

The County listed itself as the “grantee” on page 2, and 203 SW Water St. (which is the City-owned Sears block) as the “project location” on page 4. Then, in answer to question 2d — “If the property is being improved, is the property owned by the grantee?” — the County checked the “Yes” box.

Question 10c asked, “If grant funds are to be utilized to make capital improvements to real property (structures/land) that your organization does not own [emphasis in original], provide a copy of the lease or other agreement (i.e., easements, rights-of-way. etc.) between your organization and the property owner that will allow your organization to continue to use the improved premises for an appropriate length of time, consistent with applicable state law and rules.” The County’s answer: “N/A.”

Question 10d asked, “Does your organization have an executed contract for the purchase/acquisition of the land/building in question?” The County’s answer: “N/A.”

Question 10g asked, “Provide the name, address, phone number and email address (if applicable) of the entity from which the land/building(s) is/are being purchased.” The County’s answer: “N/A.”

As you can see, the County consistently represented itself to the State as the owner of the land. When asked why, Peoria County Administrator Patrick Urich said:

By April when the grant survey was submitted, we had already negotiated the title transfer issue with the City of Peoria. As I said before, the redevelopment agreement has included language regarding title transfer since at least February, and by April, this issue had been to the County’s understanding, resolved. There were several other issues (paying permit fees, the commercial space approvals, the assurance that the funds would be there to build the museum, and what happens to the property if PRM no longer operates the museum) but the negotiating teams had moved on from the title issue.

That still doesn’t explain why this information wasn’t included on the grant application. The proper way to complete the application would have been to answer “No” to question 2d, and explain these negotiations in question 10d, at minimum. The questions couldn’t be any more specific; they clearly expect even anticipated ownership to be disclosed. The County misrepresented its ownership status no matter how one looks at it. No response was received from Urich to follow-up questions on this issue.

Other Questions

Urich’s answer raises another question: is it true that the title transfer issue with the City of Peoria had been resolved by April of this year? That was surprising, considering it has appeared as such a contentious issue here in August. I asked City attorney Randy Ray for some clarification. He replied:

There is no contract in place that requires the City to convey title to the Museum Site to the County.
It is true that there were negotiations, and draft agreements which contemplated such a conveyance. That was a major topic of a series of meetings with 3 or fewer council people that took place the first week of March, 2010. Obviously, those meetings did not convey the property, nor did anything else the City has done up to this point. If Council does not approve a Redevelopment Agreement, no conveyance will occur.

Ray acknowledges that negotiations did in fact take place, and we know from Urich’s statement that the County believed the issue of land conveyance was “resolved.” These negotiations were not just with City staff, mind you. There were “a series of meetings with 3 or fewer council people” at a time. Unfortunately, we’ll never know the real story because the City took great pains to completely skirt the Open Meetings Act (OMA).

The funny thing is that negotiation of the sale or lease of property can take place in closed session according to OMA, so why not just discuss it in executive session instead of these little meetings? Did they not want the negotiations on the record? (Minutes are taken during executive sessions.) Were they not giving the same information to each of the council members? Somewhere there seems to be a breakdown in communication because the City now appears reluctant to convey the land, but the County thought the issue was “resolved” way back in April.

Of course, there’s no legitimate reason not to conduct these negotiations in public, in open session. The reason property transactions are allowed to be conducted in secret is to protect taxpayers from market reaction. In this case, since the land is owned by one government body and being conveyed to another government body, there are no market forces and those concerns are moot.

During the 2005 mayoral campaign, then-candidate Ardis promised, “My leadership, a new generation of leadership, will be open, not closed; inclusive, not reserved for the select few; and bottom-up, not top-down.” Yet from the hotel deal to the museum, right up to the recent secret meeting with Ransburg — against whom Ardis ran in 2005 and, ironically, whom Ardis criticized for doing the public’s business in secret — he has not shown us this so-called “new generation of leadership.”