Imagine this: Judge a teacher by how much improvement the students make | Eastern North Carolina Now

    If it catches on and spreads across the USA as it should, a major revolution took place in American public education this week. The way we know it was revolutionary and major is that the teacher's union is doing backflips.

    Last Saturday the LA Times published student test data. Obviously that was not what made it revolutionary. But what they did was publish the data by teacher. And that if revolutionary.

    But what is even more revolutionary is how they reported the data. They used something called a "value added" approach. We have advocated a similar approach for years, but we called it "gain score."

    Here, briefly is how it works. You assess each child at the beginning of the year based on his/her performance in previous years, typically on average for the last three years. That tells you how much "gain" you might expect that child to make this year, assuming his performance is similar to what it has been in the past. You then compare how much gain, or "value" is actually added during the year by comparing the difference between the beginning score and the ending score compared to the average amount of change/gain/value achieved in prior years.

    Then you look at the amount of gain all the students of an individual teacher made each year. The more students who achieve their "target" score the better you can say that teacher's students did.

    You can read more about how Los Angeles did it by clicking here.

    Now Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has come out in favor of the idea. And the teachers' union is doing backflips. Union president A. J. Duffy is calling on teachers to boycott, saying ""You're leading people in a dangerous direction, making it seem like you can judge the quality of a teacher by … a test," We're sure that will ring a bell of all those students who have had their "quality" judged by hundreds of tests over the last few years.

    But as the LA Times data show: "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."

    Now, let us tell you why Mr. Duffy and the teachers unions are screaming about this approach. They know it is only a matter of time before parents insist on—get this now—have their kids assigned to good teachers rather than weak teachers. Well to do kids have always had that choice available to them but now even less wealthy students will have that chance. And we kind of suspect that Mr. Duffy and his compatriots know full well that eventually this will lead to consistent low performance of a teacher's students being a reason to terminate their contract.

    And that would be revolutionary.

    So where is Beaufort County in this revolution? Way behind. Some schools and school systems have been using the approach for several years now. East Carolina's Rural Education Institute developed such a program years ago and it work better than any comparable system but it was abandoned when the leaders who developed that system left ECU. It was used at Chocowinity Middle School by some teachers for a couple of years and test scores went up. Since it was abandoned there, scores have declined.

    The school system has yet to adopt the approach system-wide, but they say they're working toward it.

    We predict they will move more rapidly toward using such a plan when the fact that the No Child Left Behind standards have been raised so high that no school in Beaufort County will meet them. Then they come up with a new system. Hopefully it will be the "value-added" approach.

    It has certainly taken long enough.

    Delma Blinson writes the "Teacher's Desk" column for our friend in the local publishing business: The Beaufort Observer. His concentration is in the area of his expertise - the education of our youth. He is a former teacher, principal, superintendent and university professor.