Letter to the Editor: Reaction to Academic Growth Over Time Ratings

By Michelle Tepper

As a parent and the president of the E-TEAM, our non-profit parent organization at , I would like to share a concern that most parents within have.

We are extremely concerned about the class sizes growing to 29:1 for K-3 and even higher for the upper grades (I guess the sky is the limit). How is it possible for even our most competent teachers (most of whom have been riffed) to instruct young children who are still learning to sit still and pay attention for 6 hours with so many kids in a classroom? I won't even go down the safety road here, but strictly from a learning standpoint, how can one person fulfill the educational needs and basic requirements with so many students to focus on?  

In addition to teaching students who are academically on track, the teachers have to take on the responsibility of helping the children who have borderline behavioral issues, but have not obtained or been granted an IEP, or do not have an aid because of budget cuts. These teachers have no choice but to help every child in the classroom and if a child is disruptive, it stops the entire learning process for all the students in the classroom. Test achievement is not the only focus that the teachers have to contend with, they are literally raising our children. Parents need to step it up at home with spending quality time with their children at night reading, writing in a dream journal or practicing math problems, whether they work full-time or not.

If you have kids, it is your responsibility to teach them, not only the school's.

I do believe in testing because it simply is not possible in such a large system as LAUSD to determine the academic ability of each student and the performance of schools and teachers without some formal benchmark system. Does testing a child accurately depict what has happened in a classroom? Is it fair to the teacher? It's hard to say.  

Page 3 of the study which recaps the Academic Growth over Time per grade level is quite frankly...disturbing. How is it possible that our API Score at Encino Elementary went from 897 to 916 in 2010 and in the same year the results for the Academic Growth over time, go down compared to the 3 year average? This must be due to the increase in class size at our school because our teaching staff has not changed significantly. Maybe the committee that created this report can email me an explanation. This is what I have to assume because the creators of this report (which I am sure cost tens of thousands of our dollars to prepare and distribute) do not give the parents, teachers or staff any answers, suggestions or additional school information such as class size increase, reduced supplies budget which may inhibit teaching (ie.#2 pencils to take these tests, the number of books that weren't supplied to our library, lack of healthy food choices for lunch, and I could go on and on and on.) 

I would like to know what will be done with this information - a solution other than cutting our best teachers or slashing the school budget. What happens to this report? To me, it's as senseless as going to GreatSchools.net to figure out how good a school is.

This year we may lose five incredible teachers, the only library aide that we have, office staff members, a cut in our nurse's hours and we already have our parents paying for PE, science, art and computer instruction. Keeping our best teachers should be our number one priority. 

When LAUSD figures out how to do that, the scores will go up.