L.A.’s Best Educators Aren’t Teaching Students Who Need Them Most
A new study of the Los Angeles public schools by The Education Trust–West shows Latino, African-American, and low-income students are less likely than their peers to be taught by the ablest teachers. The impact of inequities in the nation’s second largest school district can be measured in months of learning and can accumulate through the grades. Meanwhile, patterns of teacher mobility and seniority-based layoffs contribute to the quality gap for the students who need the most.
"Learning Denied: A Case for Equitable Access to Effective Teaching In California's Largest School District" looked at the educational gains of students in the Los Angeles Unified School District according to how their teachers ranked on value-added assessments. The findings reveal that the average student taught by teachers ranked in the top 25 percent gains half a year of learning in English-language arts (ELA) and four months of math learning more than a student with a teacher in the bottom quartile. Multiply that learning gap by 12 years of school and it is clear how far good teaching can catapult kids toward success — and how far weak teaching can drag them backward.
For example, Los Angeles second-graders who began academically behind their peers and then had three top-quartile teachers, reached proficiency in fifth grade. Sadly, their counterparts with bottom-quartile teachers remained trapped below grade level.
ETW also found that the commonly used measures of teacher quality, including years of experience and “Highly Qualified Teacher” status, fail to predict effectiveness in the classroom. While teachers do improve with time, especially in their first few years on the job, gaps in effectiveness among teachers outweigh the differences based on years in the profession. The disparity between a first-year teacher and one with 10 years of experience, for instance, amounts to a mere 3.5 weeks of learning in ELA and 2 weeks in math.
What’s more, the likelihood of a low-income student having an English teacher who ranked low on the value-added measure is more than twice that of a student whose family is better off financially. Low-income students in LAUSD also are 66 percent more likely to have a low-value added math teacher. These patterns are even worse for students of color, with Latino and African-American students two to three times more likely (in math and ELA, respectively) to have bottom-quartile teachers than their white and Asian peers.
The ETW report offers recommendations for state and district leaders in California and around the country on how to dismantle these disparities:
• Build evaluation systems to identify both effective teachers and those who are failing to raise student performance.
• Develop programs and policies that place and retain the best teachers in the highest need schools.
• Offer teachers the high-quality professional development that leads to significant gains in student achievement.
• Reform state policies that keep local leaders from making decisions in the best interests of students, and that have caused the loss of effective teachers from high-need schools.
• Grant states the oversight needed to ensure that low-income students and students of color are not disproportionally taught by ineffective teachers.
