In a campaign where New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg donated 1.25 million to an independent expenditure supporting her opponent, San Pedro Elementary Chapter Chair and 5th grade teacher Monica Ratliff won her election to LAUSD School Board District 6. An independent expenditure launched on behalf of her opponent spent over $2 million. Her campaign raised roughly $52,000. She won! Public education is not for sale! Here’s to looking forward to Monica Ratliff’s leadership starting July as the newest member of the LAUSD School Board. Hopefully now the School Board will begin to put students and families first!
Tag Archives: education
Linking Teacher Evaluation to Student Test Scores: Wrong 25% of the Time
Nowhere is the disconnect between billionaires and public school teachers more stark than when it comes to merit pay proposals. So why are self-anointed ‘reformers’ pushing this agenda, and why do public school teachers so overwhelmingly oppose these efforts?
The Los Angeles Times launched a series on “Value-Added” assessments last year, and they continue to stand by it, despite the reportedly high error rate. This year, LAUSD Superintendent John Deasy (who previously worked for The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) has launched a new proposal, now called Academic Growth Over Time, and unilaterally implemented it, even though teacher evaluation is a negotiated issue. The District has even offered money to school sites that participate in this “voluntary” process. United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) has filed an unfair labor practice charge with the Public Employee Relations Board (PERB) over its implementation.
Why you should vote Marguerite LaMotte District 1
Please vote March 8 for UTLA-endorsed Los Angeles Board of Education candidate Marguerite LaMotte in District 1.
Unlike her opponent, LaMotte, has opposed abdicating responsibilities to charter school companies.
Current school board member LaMotte wants to spend money where it should be: the classroom. LaMotte grew up in the Deep South under segregation, was involved in Civil Rights struggles and believes that a quality education for all children is the cornerstone of democracy and that equal access to education is how we begin to start to level the playing field.
Click Here: Article Continued on Intersections South LA
Value-added: Has the data been cooked?
A report published this month by UC Berkeley economist Jesse Rothstein raises serious ethical questions about the objectivity of an analysis of “value-added” models by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
In his report, “Review of Learning About Teaching, ” Rothstein concludes that The Gates Foundation’s “Measures of Effective Teaching” (MET) Project contains, “troubling indications that the Project’s conclusions were predetermined.” Rothstein asserts that “the Gates Foundation has widely circulated a stand-alone policy brief (with the same title as the research report) that omits the full analysis, so even careful readers will be unaware of the weak evidentiary basis for its conclusions.”
To promote “value-added” as a measure of teacher effectiveness, The LA Times hired Richard Buddin, a professor at UCLA, and paid him an undisclosed sum to conduct a statistical analysis of student test data. Buddin has himself been rated as ineffective by his own students on a website where UCLA students rate teachers.
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