A recent report that the Los Angeles public schools will start publishing test scores by individual teachers has touched of a storm of protest. The so-called value-added gauges are intended to provide data on how well teachers improve the test scores of their students over the course of a school year.

An academic report by the Economic Policy Institute argues that “the nonrandom assignment of students to classrooms and schools—and the wide variation in students’ experiences at home and at school—mean that teachers cannot be accurately judged against one another by their students’ test scores, even when efforts are made to control for student characteristics in statistical models.”

Although that makes a lot of sense, I understand where the push for value-added gauges comes from. As a parent, I’ve never felt that the effectiveness of my children’s teachers has been evaluated in any meaningful way. Average and incompetent teachers return, year after year, to inflict their ineptness on their students. Lacking any reportable measures of competence, they are unaccountable for their performance except as part of an aggregate school’s overall performance. Teachers need to be accountable for the quality of their work, but measuring that quality has been elusive.

The EPI report offers alternatives that rely less on test scores such as “systematic observation protocols with well-developed, research-based criteria to examine teaching,” but, as the report observes, “American public schools generally do a poor job of systematically developing and evaluating teachers.” And this is only getting worse as shrinking budgets cut funds needed for teacher development.

If nothing else, the value-added gauges will force schools and teachers’ unions to come up with better measures of teacher quality. Without that motivation, no measures will be found because nobody welcomes performance measures. I don’t know how many companies I’ve worked with where one department or another claims that what they do cannot be measured (and often, it’s marketing). Well, it can. It may not be easy. Your first attempts to measure performance may fail. But if you don’t persist, if you choose not to measure teacher performance, how can education at your school possibly improve?

To read more about quality education, click on these articles:

• Best-Practice Teaching
• School Districts Saving Money
• Lessons from High-Performing K-12 Schools
• Inspiration for a New Education System
• Reinventing Education with Baldrige
• Baldrige and K-12: Not for the Faint-Hearted

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