-By Warner Todd Huston
Now usually when someone points out that one has done something badly or has failed in something, the average person would look at those accusations and assess where they went wrong in order to correct the situation for the future. Not unions, though. Unions boycott those that point out union failures. Such is the case in Los Angeles as union teachers are organizing a boycott of the L.A. Times for daring to point out that kids in the L.A. school district are all too often failing miserably.
In a series of recent articles the Times used student test scores to estimate the effectiveness of L.A.’s teachers. This infuriated the union.
“You’re leading people in a dangerous direction, making it seem like you can judge the quality of a teacher by … a test,” said A.J. Duffy, president of United Teachers Los Angeles, which has more than 40,000 members.
By analyzing the test scores, the Times found that kids that did well with good teachers often lost ground when later entering the classrooms of bad teachers.
After a single year with teachers who ranked in the top 10% in effectiveness, students scored an average of 17 percentile points higher in English and 25 points higher in math than students whose teachers ranked in the bottom 10%. Students often backslid significantly in the classrooms of ineffective teachers, and thousands of students in the study had two or more ineffective teachers in a row.
Worse, the Times feels that school administrators did not fully utilize the test score statistics for fear of the union’s reactions. Apparently the schools would rather placate unions than improve the education of our children.
Click on over to the L.A. Times for the whole story.
____________
“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
For a full bio, please CLICK HERE.