The teacher ratings project grew out of a series that the Los Angeles Times ran in May 2009. Education reporter Song wrote several stories under the title Failure Gets a Pass. ^[1] Song reported that LAUSD, due to union contracts, had difficulty firing the worst teacherseven those accused of molesting students. Instead, it transferred them out of the classroom but continued to pay them, which cost the LAUSD about $10 million a year. ^[2]

After the series ran, Education Editor Beth Shuster and Special Projects Editor Julie Marquis , who handled investigative stories, met to brainstorm about future education stories. They recognized that the problems laid out in Failure Gets a Pass applied only to a tiny percentage of LAUSD educators. What about less egregious, but still poor teachers? Perhaps the paper should next take a look at a persistent concern of parentsis my childs teacher helping him learn?

Teaming Up . In early June 2009, Marquis asked investigative reporter Felch if he wanted to work with Song on a story that probed which LAUSD teachers were effective. The two quickly discovered that the Los Angeles public school system had, in essence, no meaningful teacher rating system. What passed for evaluation was in-class observation once a year, or even only once every few years. Virtually every teacher was rated satisfactory.It was shocking, recalls Education Editor Shuster:

Once we started really getting into this and learning that 98 percent of teachers are being rated as satisfactory, I mean, you know from working in organizations, any business, anywhere, 98 percent of the people are not satisfactory. Theyre just not. ^[3]

Listen to Beth Shuster on teacher evaluations:

Felch and Song decided to research what was happening nationally. We looked across the country, and it turned out that almost every state in the union was using a very similar approach, this kind of very rudimentary checklist to evaluate their teachers, says Felch. ^[4] As the two reporters took a deeper dive into the academic literature on teacher effectiveness, they found many experts who believed that the teacher was the single most important school-based factor in student success or failuremore important than class size or students socioeconomic status. Moreover, they found that successful teachers did not necessarily cluster at high-performing schools but were scattered across the system. Similarly, even high-performing schools had struggling teachers.

One group of studies which reinforced the teacher-centric view was known as value-added analysis.