A national debate has raged since mid August when the Los Angeles Times published its evaluations of 6,000 elementary school teachers in its series, “Grading the Teachers.” The paper justified its decision to make the ratings available as an “an important service, and in the belief that parents and the public have a right to the information.”

While President Obama’s administration has made a priority of compensating teachers, at least in part, for their performance, a big part of the controversy is the evaluation method that the LA Times used in its analysis and whether the paper did enough to make the readers aware of the limitations of the “value-added” approach it employed.

“Grading the Teachers” has been a wake-up call to those in research, journalism and education circles to grapple with the evaluation, journalistic and policy issues raised by the LA Times report. On September 27, UC Berkeley answers that call by holding the first and largest public forum to consider the methods and implications of the LA Times report, what promising teacher evaluations are on the horizon and, ultimately, how and whether teachers and students can benefit from them.

Panelists
Jason Felch, Investigative Reporter, Los Angeles Times
Mark Wilson, Professor, UC Berkeley Graduate School of Education
Senator Carol Liu, State Senator 21st District
Richard Rothstein, Research Associate, Economic Policy Institute
Susan Rasky, Senior Lecturer, UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism
Eric Hanushek, Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution at Stanford University
David Plank, Executive Director, Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE)
Kyla Johnson-Trammell, Principal, Sequoia Elementary School, Oakland

Moderator: Louis Freedberg, Senior Reporter, California Watch