In one of the first rulings in the nation on the public’s right to access information about the effectiveness of public school teachers, a judge in Los Angeles upheld that teacher performance ratings are a matter of “keen public interest” and should be released.
Last week’s ruling is a significant victory in the education reform movement and underscores the significance of California’s Public Records Act in providing sunshine in government.
The ruling is a victory in the national debate over how much information parents are entitled to know about the effectiveness of their children’s teacher. The ruling also provides new impetus for plaintiffs seeking to overturn state statutes that have made it next to impossible to fire incompetent teachers.
The case for public disclosure was argued by an attorney for the Los Angeles Times, which had previously published data on teacher ratings. The newspaper contended that “the … district …[compiles] this information to benefit the public, and the public has a protected interest in evaluating the district’s performance.”
The Los Angeles Unified School District joined the United Teachers Los Angeles union in arguing against releasing the data, warning it is confidential personnel information, and release would result in “stigma,” “embarrassment” and pose obstacles in trying to recruit teachers to work for the district.
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge James Chalfant rejected these arguments, ruling that the public interest in access to the ratings outweighed any teacher expectations of privacy under the California Public Records Act.
Should taxpayers have the right to know how effective are public school teachers?
Ground zero in the education reform debate is the issue of teacher effectiveness. Studies have found that the most critical variable affecting the educational outcomes of students is the effectiveness of classroom teachers. Even children who enter a classroom academically behind other students reap measurable benefits from effective teaching, and can close achievement gaps in one or two years.
Understanding the teacher-effectiveness debate is, at its core, a debate over compensation practices. Teachers unions advocate models using a straight salary schedule based on number of years of employment (seniority). This approach is embedded in most state statutes, which teachers unions were influential in getting enacted.
Education reformers are demanding to link compensation, in part, to teacher “merit” and the “value added” to the child’s educational attainment in any given academic year. This approach directly challenges the union seniority system, which fails to recognize any differentiation of teaching effectiveness, perpetuating “the dance of the lemons,” whereby poorly performing teachers are simply shifted from school to school.
UTLA and LAUSD argued that the teacher evaluation data is faulty and unfair to individual teachers. Undoubtedly, evaluation systems being developed by districts are new, and may take some time to perfect. But, even as Judge Chalfant wrestled with his personal feelings regarding the data release, he ruled that the ratings do not contain any personal information or “evaluative” criticism of teachers. The data to which the public would have access are statistical tabulations of already public data about student performance in a given teacher’s class. He also rejected the arguments that teachers would be “harmed” with the release.
UTLA has threatened to appeal the ruling. We also should anticipate that the unions will run to the Legislature to have the ruling overturned using the “gut and amend” technique to quickly pass a bill at the last minute.
In a new era of parent empowerment in which parents have been given real rights to seek school transformations, it is imperative that the ruling stand. We have a right to know.
Read the full post here.