The nation’s second-largest district released school ratings last week based on a new, value-added approach that measures a school’s success by how well it raises students’ performance. The Los Angeles Times stirred controversy last year when it used a similar approach to rate teachers.
The Los Angeles Unified School District plans next month to provide thousands of teachers with its own confidential ratings of their performance using the value-added approach.
The district also is negotiating with the local teachers’ union to include such a measure in teachers’ formal performance reviews in the future, an effort that the United Teachers Los Angeles union opposes. The new measure of academic success has been a priority for incoming Superintendent John Deasy.
