Stupid kids or adult gamesmanship? Only one of these two explanations can answer why Bossier Parish students score decently but not all that well on normed exams while nearly three-quarters of their teachers score highest on state evaluations -- with a similar relationship observed in other parish and community school systems in Louisiana as well.
Recently, the Louisiana Department of Education released the latest evaluation scores by local education agency of their teachers, following up last month’s release of LEAP 2025 scores. LEAP test passage is required for advancement and ultimately graduation of students. Earlier this year, the ACT organization made public statewide results of its exam and the College Board released Advanced Placement test numbers; these are tests taken by high school students for admission and college credit purposes.
Within the state, Bossier Parish students performed above average, often just in or close to the top ten districts on the various LEAP measurements for 4th, 8th, and 12th grade, as well as on the ACT and various AP exams. While LEAP exams are specific to the state, the others are national and when stacking up Bossier students with their national peers, they underperformed by the numbers. (The National Assessment of Education Progress test for 4th and 8th grades is national in scope, but NAEP doesn’t publicly have figures broken down by LEA although by state which shows that Louisiana, while improving recently to some of its best results ever, still ranks below average overall).
The ACT numbers are somewhat skewed because only a few states require all students to take the exam as did Louisiana, and among these Bossier students scored better than all such state averages except for Wyoming. But they scored significantly lower than averages in other states with near-universal test-taking, and below the national average as a whole. (Thanks to the efforts of prior School Board members Bossier Parish Republican state Rep. Dennis Bamburg assisted by Bossier Parish GOP state Sen. Adam Bass, Louisiana no longer will require all students take the ACT to graduate, against the wishes of the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education and LDOE, that will allow school boards to save face to some extent for continued district underperformance.)
Also, the AP numbers are prone to self-selection, as students choose to take these although in Louisiana it appears as many as half did. Nonetheless, Louisiana’s numbers were well below the national average, and while it is difficult to convert the broad reporting of either above or below a score of 3 (average) to discrete average scores by parish, it would appear Bossier students were a bit below the national average and definitely were below the state average as well.
Not bad, but not great. Yet state evaluations of Bossier teachers recorded the second-highest, 73.1, proportion in the most superlative category of Highly Effective. This was about 30 points above the state average and over 60 above the lowest scoring LEA. Which leads us to the inconsistency: if Bossier teachers are so fantastic – in fact, the two lowest categories contained only about one percent of teachers while statewide that was about 10 percent – then why are its students at best performing at an average level nationally, or even not close to the very top in the state?
If we take both things as true – great teachers and average students – and we assume teaching matters in student outcomes, then the only conclusion that ties the two together is Bossier students enter school dumb as rocks and only superlative teaching over the years drags them up to par. Skipping an extensive foray into the education literature that would question this assessment of the inherent capabilities of Bossier students generally, sticking to just an eye/smell test this assessment doesn’t at all seem likely and probably Bossier students as a whole come in a range not too much below nor too much above the intellectual capacities and access to environmental resources typical for American students that affect their educability.
Which then leaves the proposition that there’s a whole lot of fudging upwards and puffery going on in Bossier schools when it comes to the teacher evaluation process, likely much more than in most LEAs. If the mean score of evaluations for every LEA, compiled through a procedure established by the state, could very validly and reliably measure with accuracy actual teaching ability, you might expect something like a normal distribution among LEA scores, perhaps with a skew towards higher scores but not absurdly so and, moreover, with districts having not entirely dissimilar distributions of scores. One glaring piece of evidence that the measuring instrument isn’t being applied consistently is that there are big outliers such as in Bossier’s results.
That becomes even more obvious when understanding how evaluations are computed. Basically, there is a quantitative component and a qualitative, with the latter based upon classroom observations (through last year; state changes this year slightly alter the qualitative inputs and also establish a new highest category for evaluations) and each counting for half the overall scoring.
However, the quantitative half isn’t all that “quantitative.” It is comprised of student growth – comparisons of test scores prior to the start and at the end of the school year – and learning targets agreed upon between teacher and administrator. But that’s only for teachers in the areas of languages, sciences, and mathematics where normed exams exist, where this growth component is 70 percent of that half. For all others, it’s 100 percent based upon targets.
Thus, it’s not too difficult to game the system by selecting relatively undemanding targets. And even more easily manipulable is the subjectiveness of the observation side, which is performed by administrators or specially-designated teachers, which by the numbers leads to eye-opening differences among LEAs.
Using Bossier as an example, an astounding more than 85 percent of teachers scored for the subjective Professional Practice category in the top Highly Effective category – just missing the highest in the state – and almost all others in the Effective: Proficient category. In fact, only 0.4 percent landed in the lowest two categories, implying in the classroom 249 out of every 250 teachers were superior, leaving only about 6 evaluated in the entire district as having deficiencies.
Contrast this with the Student Outcomes half, comprised of the Student Learning Target Ratings and (for some) the Value-Added Data. For Student Outcomes as a whole, Bossier only had just under 70 percent of teachers in the highest category, ranking third of the 69 parish/community LEAs, and just over 6 percent in the lowest pair. This was almost 20 points above the state average for the Highly Effective group. Still, it’s a pretty good result.
Except for the understanding realized when breaking things down further. While Ratings had Bossier again second overall at almost 88 percent and with only just over a percent in the lowest category duo, just about 30 points higher than the state average, Data had only around 15 percent rated Highly Effective and less than half of all teachers making the upper two categories. For Highly Effective, the system ranked only 46th – in other words, just barely escaping the bottom third – which was almost four points below the state average.
It's hard not to conclude, from this latest academic year 2024 data, noting that Bossier students underperformed in growth – the only truly non-subjective portion of the evaluation – that the overall extremely high ranking on the overall was a result of gamesmanship leveraging the subjective portion. That further is validated by fair-to-middling test results of students near to exiting the system when compared to their national peers.
Perhaps the blatancy of this is why when the evaluation results came out the public heard nary a peep out Bossier Schools – which typically doesn’t spare the horses when it comes to self-promotion – about the stratospheric overall performance, the questionable credulity of which would be too obvious to miss even with the most casual poking around of the numbers. Now that the sham has been explicated in the public domain, the question is what will the School Board and Superintendent Jason Rowland do about it?
Do they admit the district isn’t doing that great of a job and seek ways not only to ensure a more realistic picture of teacher performance is presented in the future, necessary to understand deficiencies for corrective action, but also to take that corrective action? Or do they continue to cheerlead district performance that only blows sunshine up skirts and to break their arms patting themselves on their own backs? Bossier parents – and those of other Louisiana LEAs that showed a similar pattern – deserve the honest response, meaning these elected officials and administrators will have to act like genuine educators, not like politicians as they too often do.
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