Arlene Beth Marinoff

Arlene Marinoff's Response:

I am very happy to see that I am " most effective" in English and somewhat happy to see that I am "more effective" in Math. I must say, however, that I think this way of evaluating teachers is very unfair. There are so many factors that are involved in a child's CST score. These are not examined in the Value Added Measure of a teacher. How many of the children who score poorly on the test (1.) have problems at home, ( 2.) are unmotivated to do well , (3.) are bad test takers, (4.) should be in a special ed class but their IEP was mixed up by a person who works in the office and instead was given an SST (5.) transferred to another school 6 months prior to the CST but showed up on my class list anyway and scored below basic? All six of these factors affected my overall rating and luckily my overall scores were good enough that I won't be "blacklisted" in The Los Angeles Times on Sunday (this year anyway).
I would also like to add that it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out who are the good teachers and who are the bad teachers. I agree that bad teachers should not be allowed to stay in the classroom. However, there are so many ways to judge an ineffective classroom teacher. t I feel too much pressure is being placed upon the teacher to have his/her students to do well on the CST. This I believe will cause other problems such as teaching to the test or teachers taking other measures to assure that their students score well on these standardized tests.
Lastly, I would like to say maybe instead of listing the teachers whose children did poorly, let's list the names of the parents whose children did poorly!!!!! Let's start making parents accountable for their children's success as well as the teachers.
A.B.M.