AGT School Reports Published by LAUSD…

…and Henry Clay’s is not pretty.

Predictably, really. You don’t wind up as a Public School Choice Focus School, and then get handed over to a Charter to run, because everything is coming up Unicorns and Rainbows. However, looking at the breakdown…it’s kind of depressing.

What is the AGT? It stands for Annual Growth over Time. The results of the data study show the measure of a school’s impact on students in either Math or English, for both the past year, and for the past three years. for the purposes of a “yardstick”, the measurement is against predicted growth, and against the District Averages, which are a 3 out of 5 on the chart.

The chart is conveniently color coded, as well. You want the bubbles on the chart to be green or blue…any other colors are progressively bad, down to red.

Again, these were published today, and can be viewed here.

You may be saying to yourself, isn’t this what Value Added Measures are? Kind of. It’s pretty similar in many ways. The vaunted Value added measures tend to look at individual teachers, where this is more of a “school report card.”

The Union (UTLA) links the two, inextricably.

In a mail sent to the Hammer Lane by a Union member, the following statements (red font) were made by UTLA.  Again, my apologies for UTLA’s poor E-mail formatting.:

AGT/VAM cannot be used for evaluations

This month LAUSD will roll out its so-called AGT (Academic Growth Over Time) program that analyzes student learning over time. Even though the LAUSD’s own material clearly states that the goal is “a confidential, no stakes release of results to educators,” LAUSD is trying to steamroll schools into linking student test scores to teacher evaluations.

ANY USE OF AGT IN EVALUATIONS MUST BE NEGOTIATED WITH UTLA : LAUSD is conveniently ignoring this fact in its AGT materials. UTLA has NOT negotiated the incorporation of AGT into evaluations.

LAUSD’S VERSION OF ACADEMIC GROWTH OVER TIME IS THEIR NAME FOR VAM: LAUSD’s version of VAM is as deeply flawed as the L.A. Times version because it relies on the same faulty premise: that teachers can be fairly evaluated by how their students do on a standardized test, which measures just a small sliver of what happens in a classroom during the academic year.

Interesting stuff, that.  I would say this:  it is very true that more goes on in a classroom than can be demonstrated by a number.  However, with student achievement being such a critical factor in education now, with more and more schools failing…shouldn’t it be a significant component in analysis?  If teacher’s aren’t accountable to student learning, then what are they accountable to?

If my students aren’t doing well, isn’t it fair to include that as part of my evaluation?  Because really, if I have all the dedication in the world, but students still don’t learn, I seem to be missing the point of the endeavor.

More later, on this, and further Union statements about it.  Now…I would take the time to look up your school, or your children’s school, or your neighborhood school, and see what the color coded chart has to say.