Sarah Perez Silverman

Sarah Perez Silverman's Response:

(1) These were my first years as a teacher, so there was a learning curve. In more recent years my students' scores have shown much more growth than they did in the years reflected in this article, because I have grown as a teacher. (2) In my 8 years of teaching I have taught 5 grade levels, including a combination class. This is a common problem among many of the newer LAUSD teachers and something that should be addressed. (3) I have moved to a school with a very supportive administration that has supported me as a teacher in ways I was not supported early in my career. I hope that the LA Times plans to research and publish articles relating to administrators' effects on schools. (4) The LA Times website claims that, "Research has repeatedly found that teachers are the single most important school-related factor in a child’s education." While this may be true, school is not the only factor in a child's life and education that affects her or his scores. Degree of English proficiency, and more importantly the child's home environment and background, have a huge affect on performance. I feel that singling us out by name is putting an unfair amount of pressure on us by saying that it's our teaching that is causing students to either succeed or fail, when in fact it is a wide variety of factors. (5) There are about a million other factors that need to be discussed, and I think that while this is a very worthwhile conversation to have, comparing teachers' scores is not the way to do it. (For example, if I followed a strong teacher, my students would appear to have gone down in their scores, making me look like a less effective teacher. If I followed a weak teacher, my job in raising kids' scores would have been extremely easy because their previous year's scores would have been low.)