St. Mary school takes a hit

Teachers rated high: Louisiana’s new rating system says locals are ‘highly effective’
September 10, 2013
Brave new world of ‘net policing’
September 10, 2013
Teachers rated high: Louisiana’s new rating system says locals are ‘highly effective’
September 10, 2013
Brave new world of ‘net policing’
September 10, 2013

The state Department of Education’s new teacher evaluation model has labeled more than one in four teachers at Franklin Junior High as “Ineffective,” a branding that under new law puts the teachers on a path to losing tenure and, possibly, their jobs.

Ineffective is the worst of four categories in which teachers are placed. Franklin Junior High saw 29 percent of its teachers placed in this category, by far the most in the Tri-parish area, seven-times the 4-percent state average and the 10th-largest total among more than 1,300 Louisiana traditional schools not in a recovery district, state data released last week show.

St. Mary Parish School Board Superintendent Don Aguillard said the results were unsurprising, given that Franklin Junior High has been a school the parish has targeted for improvement over the past few years.


FJH, a high-poverty school, is in its third year participating in the state-funded Teacher and Student Advancement Program, which emphasizes professional growth, performance evaluation, competitive compensation and accountability.

“TAP schools have a tremendous amount of professional development,” Aguillard said. The superintendent said the program has proven to have a positive impact on B.E. Boudreaux Middle’s test results over the past two years. “We’re anticipating that to happen at Franklin Junior when all of the pieces are in place.”

Franklin Junior High’s School Performance Score equated to a D grade in 2011-12, according to the latest available data.


Included in the newly released teacher evaluation rankings, the percentage of the school’s students who are proficient was 49 percent in 2012-13, and the school experienced 3 percent growth in the number of its students reaching basic and above on standardized tests as compared to one year prior. Franklin Junior High, which teaches sixth- through eighth-grade, concluded the 2012-13 year with 23 teachers and 276 students, according to Monica Mancuso, the district’s supervisor of secondary education.

Compass, the new rating system’s moniker, was approved by the Legislature in 2010 and enacted in 10 districts as a pilot program in 2011-12 before its full rollout last year.

Teachers’ advocates across the state have criticized the new model, and state education leaders have conceded changes are needed. But the system is already blocking pay raises for some, and one year from now, school district leaders will have newfound latitude to purge their instructional rosters of those deemed Ineffective, which Aguillard said carries the onus of discretion.


“I would want to be absolutely sure that we’re measuring ability correctly before we terminate people,” the St. Mary superintendent said. “A termination is this business is a serious event. It makes your re-employment very difficult.”

State Rep. Sam Jones, D-Franklin, decried Compass for what he described as imbalances in rating policies. The system is inherently harsh against FJH and other high-poverty schools, where learning environments are not always stable, he said. Jones also criticized the emphasis on testing data, which coerces educators into “teaching the test,” he said.

“It’s time for the micro-managers from Baton Rouge to get the hell out of our parishes and put the onus and responsibility on the superintendents and school boards,” Jones said. “Let the people on the school boards and the superintendents develop what they need as the appropriate models for hiring and firing.”


Repeated attempts to reach Franklin Junior High principal Molly Stadalis were unsuccessful. Stadalis, going into her third year with FJH, was the state’s middle school principal of the year in 2007 while she was at Patterson Junior High, which improved its performance scores under her tenure.

Stadalis is conducting research on turning around low-performing schools through her doctoral studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, according to Mancuso.

DOE: New system enshrined in law, yet still needs ‘changes’


DOE released the inaugural ratings last week, compiled by a system that uses student data and principals’ observations of teachers to judge public educators’ value.

Teacher judgments have taken on greater importance since sweeping education reform has linked pay and job protections to teacher effectiveness. Legislation passed in 2012, still being challenged in court by the Louisiana Federation of Teachers, prohibits pay raises to teachers lumped in the lowest tier and revokes existing tenure if the rating is applied in consecutive years.

The results came amid LFT criticism.


“For a system that has been touted as based on irrefutable scientific formulas, this report raises many more questions than it answers,” said LFT President Steve Monaghan in a printed statement. “One thing is very clear, there is no legitimate reason to deny teachers the right to question the findings.”

State Superintendent John White pointed to congruencies in student achievement and teacher ratings as proof the new system is better tuned than the one it replaced, a two-tiered system that yielded 98.5 percent of the state’s teachers as satisfactory in 2011-12. When the new measure was being devised, supporters of the reform anticipated roughly 10 percent of the state’s teachers would be flagged as Ineffective.

White also alluded to further adjustments being made to the process.


“The increase in focused feedback Louisiana educators received this year will pay great dividends for our students,” White said in a printed statement. “The alignment between student progress results and the evaluation results shows the rigor with which many school and district leaders approached this process. We have changes to make, but for the first year, we should be very proud.”

The Department of Education pointed out that of the 10 parishes with the highest percentage of teachers rated in the top two levels, seven were in the state’s top 25 percent in student progress or student achievement. Of the 10 parishes with the highest percentage of teachers rated in the bottom two categories, nine were in the bottom quartile in student progress or student achievement.

Most Franklin teachers rated on harsher scale


Compass ostensibly weighs principals’ in-class observations of teachers evenly with student outcomes, a catch-all phrase to cover both the educators judged on whether students meet teacher-individualized learning goals and those who are scored on predicted growth data from standardized testing, according to the report.

Most instructors at Franklin Junior High are judged on the value-added model.

A national initiative, the model attempts to rate how students should perform – according to a formula that supposedly computes all of a student’s qualities that impact test-taking – against how they did on certain state tests, supposedly isolating the teacher’s contribution to the student’s performance. This formula is applied to teachers of students set to take applicable standardized tests.


Seventy-one percent of the Franklin Junior High teachers were graded under the value-added model, a share met or exceeded by only 24 non-recovery district schools in the state (16 of which had none of their teachers score Ineffective through the value-added model), according to state data; of the FJH share, 42 percent were deemed Ineffective.

The rubric applied to other teachers concerns whether students meet goals set jointly by teachers and administrators. Monaghan said the different means of rating teachers, with the value-added model the more difficult of the two, is “disturbing” and “unfair.”

To his point, only 0.35 percent of the state’s teachers were deemed Ineffective through the observation process. Three percent of non-value-added-model instructors were graded Ineffective based on whether the set learning targets were met. Compared to those two figures, the 8 percent of value-added-eligible teachers who were ruled Ineffective looms large.


Though state law weighs observation and student outcomes equally, an Ineffective rating in either category results in an overall Ineffective label. No teachers at Franklin Junior High were scored Ineffective through the observation process, and none were scored Ineffective based on set learning targets.

“The individual teacher develops their own student learning target, and then it has to be approved by their principal, but it’s an easier benchmark to achieve a higher score,” Aguillard said. “If we could, and I’m sure if the state could have done it, they would have, to evaluate all teachers using the same metric would have been a much fairer way to do it, but it’s incredibly difficult. … I think John White understands that this is a work in progress, that it’s maybe not a perfect instrument and that it needs to be tweaked and it needs to be modified, and I think we need to use it to help identify teachers who need additional help.”

One concern repeatedly expressed by educators when the legislation was being crafted was the influence children’s attitudes, ability to learn and, in some cases, disinterest have on the value-added model process. The responsibility, in some cases, they argued, lies with parents.


“We have to be careful that we’re not giving a teacher an unfair assignment to raise test scores, particularly if there are kids in there with discipline problems, kids in there with special needs or kids in there with other problems,” Aguillard said.

Roughly 95 percent of FJH students were eligible for free or reduced lunch status last year, according to the school’s website. The state’s threshold for high-poverty classification is 65 percent.

High-poverty status does not always prohibit high student achievement, as proven by dozens of schools that are annually recognized for striving in an impoverished environment.


Jones, however, pointed to the school’s high-poverty status as something that can negatively impact the learning environment.

“If you did a Compass score for Bobby Jindal on the number of people living in poverty in this state versus the rest of the nation, he’d flunk,” Jones said. “If we’re going to judge teachers that way, let’s judge him, too. Let’s judge John White. Let’s judge them all.”

The value-added model, according to its advocates, does quantify a student’s socioeconomic background.


At least one in 10 teachers at three other Tri-parish schools are Ineffective, according to Compass: W.P. Foster Elementary (13 percent), J.A. Hernandez Elementary (11) and Lockport Middle (11). In each of those cases, the Ineffective rating was based solely on student outcomes.

Twelve percent of Franklin Junior High’s teachers were evaluated as “Effective: Emerging,” the second-lowest tier, 59 percent were labeled “Effective: Proficient” and none received the “Highly Effective” rating.

The report, itself, cautioned against making snap judgments concerning a teacher’s rating.


“The report is not meant to pass immediate judgment,” the document reads. “Using this tool well will require patient review of where there are commonalities and where there are differences in how the Compass tool was used in its first year. … It is a prompt to conversation and part of the learning process.”

Still, state law makes it clear that the ratings will be used to determine teachers’ livelihoods.

“We are looking at cases in which teachers are rated highly effective on their classroom observation, and highly effective on Student Learning Targets, but ineffective on (value-added model) scores,” Monaghan said. “Their students all showed growth but, for a number of reasons, did not meet the expectation of the VAM. Those teachers are labeled as ineffective even though all the evidence shows that they are excellent teachers.”


Franklin Junior High, pictured above, has the 10th highest share of “Ineffective” teachers among more than 1,300 traditional Louisiana public schools not in a recovery district, according to DOE data.

HOWARD J. CASTAY JR. | TRI-PARISH TIMES