Value Added Teacher Assessment

Jason Felch & Jason Song:

Terry Grier, former superintendent of San Diego schools, encountered union opposition when he tried to use the novel method. His fight offers a peek at a brewing national debate.

When Terry Grier was hired to run San Diego Unified School District in January 2008, he hoped to bring with him a revolutionary tool that had never been tried in a large California school system.

Its name -- "value-added" -- sounded innocuous enough. But this number-crunching approach threatened to upend many traditional notions of what worked and what didn't in the nation's classrooms.

It was novel because rather than using tests to take a snapshot of overall student achievement, it used scores to track each pupil's academic progress from year to year. What made it incendiary, however, was its potential to single out the best and worst teachers in a nation that currently gives virtually all teachers a passing grade.

In previous jobs in the South, Grier had used the method as a basis for removing underperforming principals, denying ineffective teachers tenure and rewarding the best educators with additional pay.

In California, where powerful teachers unions have been especially protective of tenure and resistant to merit pay, Grier had a more modest goal: to find out if students in the San Diego district's poorest schools had equal access to effective instructors.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at October 18, 2009 3:45 AM
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