Standardized Testing

Yes A great teacher is not going to create a classroom of ace test-takers. Some people are just bad at standardized exams. But students learning from good educators will show better results than those being taught by bad ones. State officials are...

No The state is once again using the wrong measuring stick to gauge the education system. Introducing a teacher-evaluation system that puts additional emphasis on how students perform on standardized tests will not cultivate America’s next...

John H. Liechty Middle School opened in 2007 in Los Angeles' impoverished Westlake neighborhood with a seasoned principal, dozens of energetic young teachers and a mission to "reinvent education" in the nation's second-largest school district. The...

Five families from across the San Fernando Valley set up camp for three nights by the front door of Wilbur Avenue Elementary School in 2009, intent on getting a spot for their children in one of the best-regarded schools in Los Angeles. Others hired...

The fifth-graders at Broadous Elementary School come from the same world — the poorest corner of the San Fernando Valley, a Pacoima neighborhood framed by two freeways where some have lost friends to the stray bullets of rival gangs. Many are the...

Like almost every teacher at this Hawaiian Gardens middle school, science instructor John Laird posts his students' standardized test results in the back of his classroom. But right next to them, Laird also put up his own evaluation. "This is my report...

It's a Wednesday morning, and Zenaida Tan is warming her students up with a little exercise in "Monster Math." That's Tan's name for math problems with monstrously big numbers. While most third-graders are learning to multiply two digits by two digits,...

For The Record Teacher scores: A Dec. 11 article in the LATExtra section reported that a preliminary study by education experts had found that teachers whose students said they "taught to the test" scored lower than average on value-added analysis. In...

WASHINGTON -- Roxanne Brummell has thrived in what many consider the toughest new testing ground for teachers in the nation. The fifth-grade teacher in Washington, D.C., earned a "highly effective" rating under the district's controversial system that...

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said Monday that parents have a right to know if their children's teachers are effective, endorsing the public release of information about how well individual teachers fare at raising their students' test scores....

The head of the Los Angeles teachers union said Saturday that he has accepted city school district officials' proposal to reopen negotiations over teacher evaluations but stopped short of saying whether a method tying teacher reviews to their students'...

Steve Franklin, a middle school teacher in L.A. Unified, had some issues with The Times series on teacher evaluations, so he fired off a letter to the editor. It read, in part: "When somebody can prove that high test scores produce good citizens,...