I am concerned by media reports that the Ministry of Education is considering taking off boards of trustees the role of hiring their school’s principal.

Rumours about such a significant proposal should not be swirling around in the media without a confirmation or denial from the Ministry. School boards and parents should be formally notified if this change is really on the table.

Prior to the election the National Party gave no signal that the Ministry would be taking over this role. It wasn’t mentioned in their policy.

The Government’s rhetoric around education is extremely contradictory at the moment. One minute National says parents need more choice via charter schools and the next it’s taking away choice from communities by removing the power of boards of trustees to appoint their own principal.

Giving local communities a degree of control over their school was central to the Tomorrow’s Schools reforms. I haven’t seen any evidence that the hiring of principals is too difficult a task for schools. It is more likely that the Government wants to make principals answer directly to them rather than the kids and parents in their local community.

I would be amazed if National is considering any such move, and the story linked to quotes various teacher politicians as their sources, so it is probably just scare-mongering.

But I am glad to see the Greens support school boards being able to appoint their own principals. I hope this means they also support school boards being able to manage their own budgets, decide on their own property needs, hire their own staff and pay them what they think is appropriate for that school?

Because why would you say the board is good enough to appoint their own principal, but not to manage their own budget?

Prime Minister John Key is defending the introduction of charter schools under a deal with ACT despite National never campaigning on it, saying “that’s MMP for you, isn’t it?”.

It is. And I see one of the registered promoters for the referendum was the NZEI arguing we should retain MMP.

Under the deal with ACT, community, religious or ethnic groups, or private companies, will be allowed to operate state-funded charter schools.

School boards will be able to set class hours and introduce performance-related teacher’s pay.

A trial will be held in South Auckland which, along with Christchurch East, will be the first areas to have the state-funded private schools within the next three years.

I’m pleased to see the trial will be in South Auckland, where young kids are not doing that well under the current system.

The prime minister rejected suggestions National had blindsided voters with changes to the education system.

“Are you really telling me that because we might trial in parts of the country, one or two schools, to see whether they can deliver better results, that somehow it’s undermining the education system in New Zealand?

“Sorry but it sounds a bit far-fetched to me.”

Oh it could well undermine the current education system – by succeeding. This is the worse nightmare of the opponents. Think if a charter school that has flexibility over staff, property and operational budgets (including ability to do performance pay) actually delivers better results than the existing schools? Think if instead of white flight, we get brown flight – Maori and PI families enrolling in the charter school because their kids get a better educational outcome there.

One prediction I will make. Regardless of how successful a charter school may prove to be, Labour will promise to close it down, or force it to become like all the other schools when the Ministry of Education and the NZEI/PPTA decides how much teachers get paid rather than the school and the teacher decide.

“I don’t think the New Zealand voters are going to be up and arms because in a couple of communities in New Zealand we give some new model a go.

“If those students don’t want to go there, they’ll be free to go to the existing schools they are at.”

Exactly. Of course some people think choice is an evil word.

UPDATE: Danyl at Dim Post thinks that charter schools are a scam and only do better because they can pick their students. However Eric Crampton at Offsetting Behaviour quotes from a study where students were selected by lottery:

Charter schools are publicly funded but operate outside the regulatory framework and collective bargaining agreements characteristic of traditional public schools. In return for this freedom, charter schools are subject to heightened accountability. This paper estimates the impact of charter school attendance on student achievement using data from Boston, where charter schools enroll a growing share of students. We also evaluate an alternative to the charter model, Boston’s pilot schools. These schools have some of the independence of charter schools, but operate within the school district, face little risk of closure, and are covered by many of same collective bargaining provisions as traditional public schools. Estimates using student assignment lotteries show large and significant test score gains for charter lottery winners in middle and high school.

This is highly exciting.

The BBC reports the 12 areas include:

• My child is happy at this school
• My child feels safe at this school
• My child makes good progress at this school
• My child is well looked after at this school
• My child is taught well at this school
• My child receives appropriate homework for their age
• This school ensures the pupils are well behaved
• This school deals effectively with bullying
• This school is well led and managed
• This school responds well to any concern I raise
• I receive valuable information from the school about my child’s progress
• I would recommend this school to another parent

I can only hope for a similar site in NZ. I was sent the link by a parent whose children are attending a great school in Wellington, and they’d like to be able to share their views on it with prospective parents.

The Los Angeles Times has produced a detailed set of estimates about how much value each teacher in Los Angeles adds to their classroom. That is hugely valuable information. New Zealand’s education establishment should be doing something similar.

I blogged last year on the remarkable data published by the LA Times. It basically measures the effectiveness of individual teachers.

Why should we follow the Times’ lead? Because it helps us to reward great teachers and provide remedial support for teachers in difficulty. And because it allows us to diagnose, early, easily, and with reasonable precision, what is going wrong when a school is performing badly. Is it one or two bad teachers? A bad english department? Poor school-wide leadership? Or is the issue in the community itself, a problem at home rather than in the classroom? The data can answer that crucial question better than a big round of finger-pointing in front of an inspector from ERO.

We can do all kinds of helpful things with this information. If one school has a dysfunctional maths department and there is a great maths teacher at another school, the government can fund the Board of Trustees to pay generous incentives to convince the great teacher to take on the troubled department as HoD. Same thing for giving great teachers powerful incentives to teach at generally underperforming schools.

Absolutely agree.

It is true that there are already multiple ways to assess teachers in New Zealand. There is teacher registration. There are periodic assessments against professional standards. In some situations, there are Teacher’s Council investigations. There is ERO. Those are all good things to have, and this data-driven assessment should be used to extend those assessment regimes, not to replace them. The data based assessment does add real value, however, both as a nationwide diagnostic tool for educators and administrators and as an individual assessment tool for rewarding great teachers and helping others improve.

True. But with teacher unions so against even allowing data on schools to be collated and analysed, I can only imagine how far they would go to stop what Rob proposes.

Who should find out the results? Well, the teachers for a start. They need to know how they are doing. And their local Board of Trustees. And the government folk should know, too. They are collectively charged with improving the educational outcomes for New Zealand’s tragically long “education tail.” Once they know how their teaching resources are distributed, they can better shuffle them around to make the system more effective.

Which is of course what the Government is trying to do with national standards, as well as give parents better information.

Parents should probably get some information about how their kid’s school does compared to other schools with similar student demographics. That is a valuable accountability mechanism for Principals, who get paid good money to be accountable to their local communities. But unfiltered league tables of area schools do more harm than good, presenting an apples to oranges comparison as if it were apples to apples.

The answer to bad league tables is good league tables. Not banning league tables.

Parents should also not get access to individual teacher rankings. Here I disagree with the Times. Why? Because it is little more than a recipe for school administrators to be drowned in a tide of the pushiest, over-caffeinated parents demanding that Little Johnny should move over to that excellent Mrs Paki’s home room. Now! We don’t get to see the latest performance review of the cop that pulled us over, or the nurse in the hospital ward, or the customs agent at the border. And rightly so. Teachers are no different.

I’m okay with parents not seeing results of individual teachers, so long as School Boards and the Government does.

Rob also says in his comments:

Secondary teachers with a BA and a teaching diploma start at $47k and can earn up to $71k at current scales, even without any of the additional salary Units under the control of Boards of Trustees. The top of their base salary scale is more pay than 90% of New Zealand adults recieve, according to IRD data. I think **great teachers** should receive substantially more compensation than this, but I do not think **all teachers** should get a big raise.

Again I agree. I’d love School Boards and Principals to have the ability to have performance pay.

Departing Tamaki MP Allan Peachey’s ambition of transforming the education sector was frustrated by his struggle with cancer and his party’s reluctance to go to war with teachers unions early in their term of government, he says.

And I think that was a strategic mistake by the Government, as it then resulted in the primary teacher unions going to war against the Government, on their terms, over a relatively minor issue.

However he indicated his National Party colleagues were reluctant to depart significantly from the direction set by Labour because that would mean the new Government buying into messy battles with teachers’ unions and sector interest groups.

“I think one of the problems with my vision was that it would have meant going back and
fighting a whole pile of battles that had been won in the 90s that had been very hurtful to a lot of people.”

Mr Peachey said he had the energy and mind to fight those battles but the opportunity never arose.

The introduction of national standards is a minor yet worthy reform. The amount of hysteria generated by the NZEI and NZPF against it has been staggering. For me that represents a lesson. You’re going to have a war regardless (unless you surrender policy control to the unions) so you might as well make the war be over something worthwhile.

I’d love a second term National-led Government to introduce performance pay for teachers, full decentralised funding of school budgets, an end to zoning except as a temporary measure while popular schools expand, and of course school choice. Oh yes, and a database of school performance such as Julia Gillard introduced in Australia.

Yes the unions will go to war against the Government, but again they did this anyway with a minor issue such as national standards, so just accept there will be a war, and make sure the cost of the war is worth it.

Teachers and parents are calling on the government to cap class sizes, despite a leading academic saying it’s not the size of the class but what you do with it that matters.

The Post Primary Teachers’ Association contends the Ministry of Education’s staffing formula disadvantages larger schools and puts them under pressure to have classes with more than 30 students.

It’s trying to make it an election issue and is pushing the ministry to reintroduce limits.

The PPTA would not specify an ideal size but the Sunday Star-Times understands it’s around 25. A Star-Times readers poll found that parents’ preferred class size was 15 to 24.

As reported above, the scientific research has found that class size has a minimal impact on learning outcomes, and the quality of the teacher has a major outcome.

Honorary Auckland University education professor John Hattie said this year that size was “irrelevant”.

“I’m not a fan of whether it’s 15, whether it’s 30, or whether it’s 60. We’ve proved that New Zealand has some of the best teachers in the world in classes of 25 to 30, so why are we worrying about class size?”

He was responding to reports of a British school teaching children in classes of up to 70.

We’d probably do better if we sacked the bottom 20% of teachers, and gave their salaries to the top 20% in return for taking on their classes also!

A reader has made a useful observation:

Mallard’s big attack has been on moderation. How do you know that school A is judging a child against say the Year 1 Nat Std in the same way as school B is judging a child against the Year 1 Nat Std.

If you accept that is a valid criticism (and Moroney has continued to run it) then Labour does nothing about it.

Labour has said they will “Determine the New Zealand Curriculum level a child is achieving.” But how do they know that two schools will make the same call without moderation. You’ll have to train and trust teachers – as National has suggested we do.

The Union’s support of Labour’s policy only shows that they don’t actually care about the issue of moderation – they just care who is fronting the policy.

So this confirms the moderation argument was always a red herring.

There is a National Standard in reading, writing and maths for each year – Years 1-8.

There are 8 curriculum levels covering children from ages 5 through to the end of high school.

That means there are approximately 4 curriculum levels covering children from Years 1-8.

It means the information is going to be meaningless. If you have a 5 year old child they will be judged against the curriculum level 1. They’ll continue to be judged against that when they’re ages 6 and 7 basically. That means for 2-3 years you’ll get bugger all meaningful information because you are being assessed against the same standard for 2-3 years.

So its national standards lite, with less meaningful standards. What a great triumph for parents and pupils.

Labour seem to almost be embarrassed by the policy. Only two Labour MPs have tweeted about it.  Their website has just a single page on it, there is no post on Red Alert about it and no questions in the House on national standards.

For the most part, my teachers were outstanding, giving me a strong love of learning and a strong grounding in the basics. This was the era – in the late forties and fifties – when English teachers still taught grammar, and that means that to this day I still know when to use “I” and “me,” “who” and “whom” and where to put commas and apostrophes – knowledge which seems totally beyond more recent school graduates! (And yes, I’m fluent in text-ese as well! I can butcher words with the worst of them!)

In fact when Reserve Bank Governor, Don e-mailed all the staff a grammar guide, as so many staff were making basic mistakes!

We have some outstanding schools – primary, secondary, and tertiary – and some extremely well-educated people. But far too many people are coming out of 11 or even 13 years of schooling without even the rudiments of literacy or numeracy, while even those who come out with good qualifications are too often unable to write grammatical English: an inability reinforced, I would suggest, by the New Zealand Qualifications Authority’s position that in NCEA assessments, “any spelling, punctuation and/or grammar errors that do not appreciably affect the intended message” don’t matter.

Sigh. So sad

And this leads on naturally to my main concern about the educational system in its entirety – the fact that education in New Zealand is effectively a one-size-fits-all state monopoly.

The overwhelming majority of New Zealand children attend state-owned or state-controlled (integrated) schools – fewer than 4 percent attend independent schools. Not only that, but many children also have no choice over the particular state school they attend, thanks to rigid zoning laws. The remuneration of teachers is highly centralised, and is determined as a result of negotiations between a bureaucratic Ministry of Education and two powerful teacher unions, one covering primary schools and the other covering secondary schools. There is little scope to reward good teaching performance, and almost no scope to dismiss teachers for poor performance.

Absolutely correct. And ACT’s policy proposals:

Have state funding for primary and secondary schools “follow the child” – to any school, state or private, meeting basic standards, including standards of literacy and numeracy. In other words, you’d get to decide which school you’d send your child to with the money the state now spends on his or her education – currently some $80,000 over the 12 or 13 years of primary and secondary schooling.

There’d be no quicker way of incentivising existing schools to lift their game.  Schools that once had guaranteed state funding would now have to answer to the parents instead. And if they didn’t respond to their children’s needs, these parents could take their money to a school that would. Free schools, such as Tū Toa, would be opened to respond to children’s needs. Bad schools would close because their once captive audience would have been freed.

You may even have good schools take over bad schools, and turn them around.

*ACT would allow and require popular schools to expand to meet demand, including by taking over the land and buildings of failing schools. Massey University has campuses in Albany and Wellington as well as Palmerston North; why couldn’t secondary schools do the same? Could you imagine the demand for places if, for example, Auckland Grammar established a Porirua campus?

Exactly. They would be flooded with applications.

We would ensure the best teachers, and principals, are the highest-paid. Boards of Trustees would be allowed to negotiate directly with staff and be able to offer performance pay and incentives. The national award system between the government and the Council of Trade Unions was dismantled in the late 1980s because it was outdated and inefficient. It is long past time we abolished it in education.

This is so important. Good teachers should be earning over $100,000 a year, but bad teachers should not even be earning $50,000 a year.

ACT should campaign to parents up and down New Zealand on this policy. Many parents would welcome choice.

And if ACT get a decent enough proportion of the vote, this should be their primary policy demand of National. They should say we don’t want want any portfolios, we don’t want any baubles of office, we just want you to implement our education policy because it is so important to the future of New Zealand.

• We need to be far more pro-active and bold in attracting, retaining and rewarding high quality teachers
• The role and importance of the Principal needs to be more effectively recognised, supported and rewarded
• NCEA should be fixed to make it more acceptable to, and adopted by, all secondary schools throughout NZ
• The Board of Governance structure set up under Tomorrow’s Schools 20 years ago should be reviewed and enhanced
• There should uniformly higher expectations and insistence on basic disciplines and respect for the rules

Performance pay for teachers is well overdue. The top teachers should be on over $100,000 and the top principals close to double that.

A leading think tank has slammed New Zealand’s education system for producing disadvantaged youth who are worse off than in any other developed country.

On average our students do well. But our “tail” is known to perform worse than almost all other OECD countries.

The business-backed New Zealand Institute, which has focused until now on economic policy, says the education system has lost sight of the need to keep young people engaged in school and transition successfully into work.

It recommends radical reforms including widespread use of computer-based e-learning, putting students on to pathways to work from the first year of intermediate school (Year 7), giving employers more input into what schools teach and giving all students career advice through school years and support after leaving school.

I hope the Government take the report and recommendations seriously.

The institute believes e-learning can reduce boredom by giving students personal links with teachers and global audiences for their work. At Auckland’s decile 1 Pt England School, with 93 per cent Maori and Pacific students, Mubasshira Mehter’s blog has been viewed by 17,452 people in 125 countries.

“People can see our work and what we’ve been doing around our school,” said Mubasshira, who is 12.

Five local primary schools have joined Tamaki Intermediate and Tamaki College in the Manaiakalani (“Hook from Heaven”) Trust, which carries the credit risk for parents to buy $400 notebook computers for their children at $15 a month for three years, including an internet connection and technical support.

Pt England principal Russell Burt said the schools used new media as “the hook of engaging students”.

And that is very much the future. Every three year old should have an iPad as a learning and development tool.

The NZI report is here.

Compare that to this story from the Daily Mail:

Under-performing teachers will no longer be guaranteed a job for life in Coalition plans to overhaul the education system.

The Education Secretary has promised to make it easier to weed out weak teachers who see the career as an easy option, as he looks to restore the status of the profession.

And mediocre candidates will be prevented from even entering the classroom under Michael Gove’s radical reforms.

Mr Gove said applicants would no longer be funded by the Government to train as teachers unless their degrees were graded 2:2 or better. He also planned to introduce tests of ‘aptitude, personality and resilience’ to assess the suitability of applicants before they embarked on teaching courses.

Tests in the three Rs that all teacher trainees must pass will also be toughened up. They will be taken at the start, rather than the end, of their courses and trainees will not be allowed multiple resits. …

To ensure schools retain the best teachers, heads will be given powers to reward top-performing staff with higher salaries.

But the sweeping proposals provoked a furious response from teaching unions. The NASUWT said Mr Gove’s proposals amounted to a ‘vicious assault’ on teachers and a ‘disgraceful denigration’ of their performance.

Wouldn’t they make good policies for a second term?

The settlement, between their union NZEI TE Riu Roa and the Ministry of Education, will give them a 2.75% pay rise from December 1st, along with a $300 lump sum payment. The collective agreements for both teachers and principals will expire in August 2012.

Well done to both parties on getting an agreement, and not going into 2011 with ongoing industrial action which tends to be a lose/lose – teachers lose wages and kids lose teaching time.

It will be interesting to see if the PPTA still refuses to budge with its claim.

New research suggests that reducing class sizes fails to improve student performance at school and the government would do better to focus on improving teacher quality.

It found mandated class-size reductions of two to three students – costing $1500 a student or $1 million a school each year – resulted in no significant improvement in academic outcomes for students in Florida.

Yet this is what the PPTA is striking over – class sizes.

Dr Jensen said a student with a teacher in the top 10 per cent of the profession can achieve in six months what a student with a poor teacher can achieve in a year.

The PPTA, if i truly wanted to lift educational standards, should demand performance pay. They should go on strike unless the Government agrees to pay the best teachers more money.

He said Australia needed to improve the effectiveness of all teachers by 10 per cent or improve the poorest teachers by 14 per cent.

This would help students learn 5 per cent more each year and improve Australia’s declining performance in world rankings of student performance.

And what a difference it can make:

”Improving teacher effectiveness would have a greater impact on economic growth than any other reform before Australian governments,” Dr Jensen said in his report.

”The improvement in student learning could lift Australian students to the top of international performance tables.”

He argues that this in turn would lift productivity, increasing growth by $90 billion by 2050, making Australians 12 per cent richer by the turn of the century.

Dr Jensen said to achieve this, governments would need to take their focus off reducing class sizes. ”The vast majority of studies around the world have shown that class-size reductions do not significantly improve schooling and student outcomes,” he said.

”Initiatives to improve teacher effectiveness not only help students more, they cost much less.”

Of course the unions don’t even want teacher effectiveness measured.

But Professor Hattie spelled out some of the problem areas.

Tomorrow’s Schools had many benefits but had created 2700 “islands” of individual schools not co-operating or sharing answers to problems.

He said that while a lot of attention was given to the “tail” of under-achievers, not enough attention was being given to children on the other side of the scale who were not achieving their potential.

This reflects what I have heard. NZ on average does well, but those at the top and the tail are both falling short of where they should be.

He believed the decile system of rating schools should be abolished – though the equity funding that went with it should not.

The decile system did not help anyone except real estate agents selling houses in decile 10 areas.

That’s a fascinating comment. I’d be keen to understand more what he proposes.

He said the Ministry of Education did not listen to teachers because they had no organisation dedicated to professional standards as that surgeons, doctors and other professionals had.

This is an incredibly perceptive comment. The NZEI, NZPF and PPTA are primarily industrial unions. Nothing wrong with that per se, but it means their primary concerns are doing what is best for teachers, not what is best for the education system. So they are never taken seriously.

Compare this to the health system, where in the public health system you have specialist unions to represent doctors on industrial issues, and different bodies such as the NZMA and the specialist Colleges on wider health issues.

The achievement gap between boys and girls is widening. Last year, half of female students at secondary schools passed NCEA Level 3 or gained sufficient attainment to attend university, while 37.1 per cent of male pupils passed.

The growing failure of boys in the education system is a scandal. If it was girls, there would be demands for the UN to investigate this discrimination, commissions of inquiry etc etc.

No doubt  there are many factors at play, but one stat I recall is that there has been no new single sex boys schools built in 30+ years.

New Zealand teachers are some of the lowest paid in the OECD, despite working more hours than most of their overseas counterparts, an international report reveals.

The annual Education at a Glance report, which compares the education systems of the 29 countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, found that after 15 years’ experience, a New Zealand teacher made $10,000 a year less than OECD counterparts on average.

The entire article is peppered with stats designed to give the impression our teachers are underpaid. It reads like a PPTA and NZEI press release. But they have missed out the most important stat – our GDP. I blogged this in response last week, and need to repeat it again:

I am not surprised teachers in Australia get paid more. Everyone in Australia gets paid more – they are a wealthier country. The solution to this problem is to increase productivity growth.

The better comparison between countries is how much do teachers get paid, compared to the average wage, or how much does a country spend on education as a percentage of GDP.

The OECD report answers the latter.

In Australia 3.5% of GDP is spent on non-tertiary education, and in New Zealand it is 4.0%. So we are already paying more as a percentage of GDP, than Australia. Hence the solution is to increase GDP, not to increase the share spent on education.

Only three OECD countries spend a higher percentage of GDP on non-tertiary education than New Zealand.

So all these stats about how teachers are paid less than the OECD average – it is because we earn less than the OECD average, and it is basic economic that you have to generate the wealth to spend it.

What would be good is if someone did some proper comparisons, such as what do NZ teachers get paid, compared to the average wage for their country and/or what do teachers get paid compared to the average GDP per capita.

The OECD doesn’t seem to have up to date average wage data for NZ, but there is good data on GDP per capita. So let’s compare teacher salaries to GDP per capita. Taking a primary teacher with 15 years experience, the data is:

• Australia $46,096 salary vs $38,911 GDP per capita = 118% ratio
• UK/England $44,630 vs $34,619 = 129%
• France $31,927 vs $33,679 = 95%
• Luxembourg $67,723 vs $78,395 = 86%
• US $44,172 vs $46,381 = 95%
• NZ $38,412 vs $26,708 = 144%
• OECD $39,426 vs $35,138 = 112%

So in fact New Zealand is paying primary teachers with 15 years experience far more, compared to our national wealth, than the OECD average, and than Australia, the US, UK, US, France etc.

Even if ones takes secondary teachers with 15 years experience, NZ at 144% pays far more relative to national wealth than even Luxembourg. So bear this in mind as you read:

They also started on an average of $10,000 less than Australian counterparts and earned up to $82,000 less than those in top-paying Luxembourg.

Again – that is because those countries are far wealthier.

New Zealand teachers get paid more, than almost any other country, compared to GDP per capita, and almost inevitably the average wage.

And if you think that this is not the relevant comparison, then you probably think money grows on trees.

A new report reveals New Zealand teachers are still paid far less than their Aussie counterparts, says the education sector union NZEI Te Riu Roa.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has released a report, Education at a Glance 2010, which compares the education systems of 29 countries.

The report shows a New Zealand primary school teacher with 15 years experience earns $US38,412 ($NZ52,871) but an Australian teacher, with the same experience, earns $US46,096 ($NZ63,447).

If the Government was serious about closing the pay gap and retaining teachers then it had to invest in education, NZEI president Frances Nelson said.

I am not surprised teachers in Australia get paid more. Everyone in Australia gets paid more – they are a wealthier country. The solution to this problem is to increase productivity growth.

The better comparison between countries is how much do teachers get paid, compared to the average wage, or how much does a country spend on education as a percentage of GDP.

The OECD report answers the latter.

In Australia 3.5% of GDP is spent on non-tertiary education, and in New Zealand it is 4.0%. So we are already paying more as a percentage of GDP, than Australia. Hence the solution is to increase GDP, not to increase the share spent on education.

Only three OECD countries spend a higher percentage of GDP on non-tertiary education than New Zealand.

Education Minister Anne Tolley is furious a Southland school put her signature on a fake letter, and officials are investigating the forgery.

Otatara Primary School pupils were given the fake letter yesterday, saying their school day was to be extended by one hour.

Written on Education Ministry letterhead, it was “signed” by Mrs Tolley, who was angry when she learned of it.

“It’s unbelievable that teachers would do this to children and I’m angry that the school has used my name,” she said. …

Otatara principal Sharon Livingstone told the Southland Times the school was uncomfortable with the news media attention, and the letter was a “mistake” that was not meant to go home to parents.

So will someone be held accountable?

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….

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.

One can almost hear the alarm bells going off in NZEI and PPTA offices around the country. You thought school league tables were bad – how about teacher league tables. And worse of all, ones that take into account outside influences, so that they do measure the impact a teacher has over time.

This graphic is not a mockup with fake names and made up data. These are two real teachers, and their real performance.

After a single year with teachers who ranked in the top 10% in effectiveness, students scored an average of 17 percentile points higher in English and 25 points higher in math than students whose teachers ranked in the bottom 10%. Students often backslid significantly in the classrooms of ineffective teachers, and thousands of students in the study had two or more ineffective teachers in a row.

And consider how fiercely teacher unions fight against performance pay.

The conclusion is one that strikes home:

We cannot simultaneously claim, however, that teachers are vitally important for the future of our children and also that their effectiveness should not be measured.  As systems like this become more common students will benefit enormously and so will teachers. Moreover, I see this as a turning point. Once parents have this kind of information who will allow their child to be in a class with a teacher in the bottom ranks of effectiveness?

Oh my God. Allowing parents to choose what schools their kids go to. When will this lunacy end.

And the from the LA Times article itself:

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.

This has been stressed back home also.

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.

Parents should not get any choice in which school their kids attend, let alone which teachers they have. This is heresy.

Other studies of the district have found that students’ race, wealth, English proficiency or previous achievement level played little role in whether their teacher was effective.

But it is all about the decile they live in!

No one suggests using value-added analysis as the sole measure of a teacher. Many experts recommend that it count for half or less of a teacher’s overall evaluation.

This is key. How you improve performance on such tests is not the only factor that should be taken into account. It is not a perfect measure. But it is still a pretty damn useful one.

On average, Smith’s students slide under his instruction, losing 14 percentile points in math during the school year relative to their peers districtwide, The Times found. Overall, he ranked among the least effective of the district’s elementary school teachers.

Told of The Times’ findings, Smith expressed mild surprise.

“Obviously what I need to do is to look at what I’m doing and take some steps to make sure something changes,” he said.

Isn’t that great? Rather than get defensive and decry the analysis, he is going to re-evaluate his teaching methods.

And also:

Still, Caruso said the numbers were important and, like several other teachers interviewed, wondered why she hadn’t been shown such data before by anyone in the district.

“For better or worse,” she said, “testing and teacher effectiveness are going to be linked.… If my student test scores show I’m an ineffective teacher, I’d like to know what contributes to it. What do I need to do to bring my average up?”

The real scandal is that it took a newspaper to do, what the education profession could not, or would not, do.