Value Added Analysis

Warren Fletcher wrapped up his work three weeks ago as an English teacher at City of Angels and moved over to the headquarters of United Teachers Los Angeles, where he is the union's new president. He missed his first negotiating session because he had to finish grading papers, and arrived at the union's imposing if slightly run-down mid-rise in Mid-Wilshire with so little fanfare that many people didn't even know he'd taken office. But Fletcher's soft start should not fool anyone: With his election, he has become one of the region's most formidable political forces, commanding a battle-hardened phalanx of unionists in desperate need of fresh leadership.

Hundreds of Los Angeles Unified School District teachers rallied in front of The Times on Tuesday evening, protesting what they said was unfair reporting in recent articles that used a statistical analysis to rank the performance of thousands of instructors. The teachers, many of them wearing red union T-shirts, waved placards that said: "Shame on the L.A. Times" and "We Demand Fair Reporting. " As organizers shouted through bullhorns and others stood on a podium that had been set up on the sidewalk, the procession marched in a circle in front of the newspaper building on 1st Street.

The Times used a statistical approach called value-added to estimate the effectiveness of teachers in Los Angeles schools. The approach has been around since the 1970s but has recently grown more popular -- and controversial -- as it is used for assessment of instructors. What is value-added analysis? Value-added estimates the effectiveness of a teacher by looking at the test scores of his students. Each student's past test performance is used to project his performance in the future.

The Los Angeles Unified School District will ask labor unions to adopt a new approach to teacher evaluations that would judge instructors partly by their ability to raise students' test scores ? a sudden and fundamental change in how the nation's second-largest district assesses its educators. The teachers union has for years staunchly resisted using student test data in instructors' reviews. The district's actions come in response to a Times article on teacher effectiveness.

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 sons and daughters of Latino immigrants who never finished high school, hard-working parents who keep a respectful distance and trust educators to do what's best. The students study the same lessons. They are often on the same chapter of the same book.

As the title suggests, Alan Aymie's “A Child Left Behind” at the Beverly Hills Playhouse takes critical aim at the ways under-resourced educational institutions fail those they're meant to serve -- in particular, disadvantaged and special needs students. Directed by Paul Stein for the Katselas Theatre Company, Aymie's heartfelt solo performance draws on his teaching experience in some of the Los Angeles Unified School District's poorest-performing elementary schools, and skillfully interleaves it with the learning challenges faced by his son diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome.

This is what one of Los Angeles Unified's most ambitious reform efforts looks like: about 30 people gathered in a Gardena school auditorium, watching a video of a teacher trying to get her young students to understand a John Updike poem. The viewers furiously type their observations into laptop computers and discuss their impressions of the lesson the next day. They ask open-ended questions — "What are some possible explanations for the lack of understanding of the vocabulary?"

Even as the annual state testing season bore down on her this spring, fourth-grade teacher Jin Yi barely bothered with test prep materials. The Hobart Boulevard Elementary School teacher used to spend weeks with practice tests but found they bored her students. Instead, she engages them with hands-on lessons, such as measuring their arms and comparing that data to solve above-grade-level subtraction problems. "I used to spend time on test prep because I felt pressured to do it," said Yi, who attended Hobart in Koreatown herself and returned a decade ago to teach.

A lawsuit filed this year against the Los Angeles Unified School District began with a narrow demand: Stop layoffs from decimating the staff ? and harming students ? at three of the city's worst-performing middle schools. But when the Board of Education announced a proposed settlement last week, what emerged was an ambitious assault on some of the district's longest-held practices. In the week since the announcement, interviews with Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, school board members, district officials, attorneys and civic leaders have provided a detailed look at how the lawsuit became a vehicle to propel fundamental changes in the nation's second-largest school district.