By Ashleigh Costello

CHULA VISTA, Calif. – Across the nation a debate is raging about the fairness of linking teacher evaluations to student standardized test scores...

...District officials say test scores and the accompanying data are useful tools that help identify areas where students and teachers need to improve.

And the students, despite numerous socio-economic challenges, have performed very well.

Living in a school district just 15 minutes from the Mexican border, more than one-third of Chula Vista students are English-language learners and nearly 50 percent qualify for subsidized lunches. Yet Chula Vista students are outperforming their peers in many more affluent districts throughout the state.

Chula Vista spokesman Anthony Millican did not mince words when talking about the importance of good test scores.

“For parents, test scores do matter,” Millican told EAGnews. “They choose to live in communities based on those testing outcomes. They look at these things. Real estate agents look at these things. They do matter and in our case, we celebrate success.”

By Teresa Watanabe

A landmark agreement to use student test scores for the first time to evaluate Los Angeles Unified instructors was approved by the teachers union Saturday.

United Teachers Los Angeles reported that 66% of 16,892 members who voted approved the agreement with the nation’s second-largest school district. L.A.  now joins Chicago, New York and many other cities in using testing data as one measure of a teacher’s effect on student academic progress.

By Teresa Watanabe

A high-spirited group of nearly 100 parents descended on the Los Angeles Unified district office Thursday and turned in petitions demanding sweeping changes at their failing school in the first use of the controversial parent trigger law in the city. 

But parents at 24th Street Elementary School in the West Adams neighborhood got a strikingly different reception in L.A. Unified than their counterparts did in Compton and the High Desert city of Adelanto, where parent trigger campaigns sparked long legal battles and bitter conflict.

L.A. Unified Supt. John Deasy greeted the parents in Spanish and welcomed them into the school board meeting room. After accepting the petitions signed by 358 parents, who represent 68% of the students, he pledged to work for “fundamental and dramatic change” at the school.  The campus is one of the district’s lowest performing elementary schools, with two-thirds of students unable to read or perform math at grade level and has made little improvement in the last six years.

By Tom Chorneau

The non-partisan Legislative Analyst raised strong objections Monday to the Brown administration’s plan to build into the state’s constitutional guarantee for schools $450 million in money earmarked for energy efficiency projects.

Those funds were generated by Proposition 39, adopted by voters in November to close a tax loophole that benefitted out-of-state companies doing business in California.

The measure, which the LAO estimates will increase state revenues by $440 million in the current year and $900 million in 2013-14, called on the Legislature to use half the money to improve energy efficiency in public buildings and for the other half to go into the state’s general fund.