No Gold Stars for successful L.A. teachers, by Jason Felch, The Los Angeles Times, August 28, 2010
There’s no question that schools need to do a better job separating the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to teacher quality. And not just so that they can rid themselves of the weakest links; shining a light on high-quality instruction is crucial, too. So asserts the L.A. Times in the latest installment in its controversial series on teacher effectiveness. Everybody and their mothers have already weighed in on the newspaper’s decision to publish the names of effective (and ineffective) teachers, and the merits and drawbacks of the paper’s particular approach to value-added measurement. (We tend to be queasy about the public release of these data-by-name, though it’s surely within a newspaper’s legitimate purview, like publishing politicians’ voting records or restaurants’ results on sanitation inspections. As for the issues with value-added analysis, we say: let not the perfect be the enemy of the good.) But what’s most striking about the Times’s latest salvo is its portrayal of an education culture in LaLa land that is uninterested in celebrating its high-achieving, butt-kicking superstars. “No one is ever really singled out, neither good nor bad,” Aldo Pinto, a hyper-effective teacher, told the Times. “The culture of the union is: Everyone is the same. You can't single out anyone for doing badly. So as a result, we don't point out the good either. When I worked at a bank, I was employee of the month. For LAUSD, for some reason, it’s not a good thing to do.” If we want to get serious about retaining high-performing teachers in our schools, we had best listen to the likes of Mr. Pinto—and recognize their incredible work.