Covered California offering ratings to most health insurance plans

Most health insurance plans offered on the state exchange will now feature quality ratings, giving consumers a better idea about their past performance.

Covered California, the state exchange, announced Tuesday that it recently incorporated the quality-rating system in its website, with marks ranging from four stars for the highest performers down to one star for the lowest.

Federal law requires the rating of plans, but officials here noted that the rating system's California debut comes about two years ahead of the mandate. Executive Director Peter V. Lee said his exchange is among the first in the nation to offer consumers a quality-rating system.

"We want to give consumers all the available tools to help them assess and choose plans in their regions," Lee said. "We are proud of the ratings in each of the exchange plans and recognize this is a preliminary look at exchange health plans."

Lee previously expressed concern that incorporating the ratings for some plans and not others would dissuade people from enrolling. His original recommendation called for implementing the ratings system for all plans offered on the exchange during open enrollment in 2015.

Health policy groups and highly-rated plans suggested the exchange simply add language to those plans explaining they had yet to receive any ratings. They sided with exchange board members who strongly recommended adding the ratings as soon as possible.

"We are pleased that those are in place and that folks can take advantage of it," said Anthony Wright, executive director of Health Access California. He also expressed gratitude that the exchange "didn't go down the path that everybody got four stars."

Ratings are a key tool for customers and an important signal to insurers, Wright said. As the exchange and insurers begin negotiations for next year's plans, insurers know that the exchange will look at consumer ratings as well as price, he said.

The ratings, based on consumer experiences, will be familiar to users of Amazon and Yelp where customers assign grades to products, movies and restaurant experiences. In this case, each insurance plan in the marketplace is compared with plans across the western region of the country.

Scores come from the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems. Four-star plans placed in the top 25 percent of all of those rated. Three, two and one stars were awarded to plans ranking 50-to-75 percent, 25-to-50 percent and 0- to-25 percent, respectively.

PHOTO: The executive director of Covered California, Peter V. Lee, speaks to members of the media during the launch of Covered California in Rancho Cordova on Oct. 1, 2013. The Sacramento Bee/Randall Benton.

Read more here: http://blogs.sacbee.com/capitolalertlatest/2014/01/california-offering-4-star-ratings-to-most-health-insurance-plans.html#storylink=cpy

After years of reform, California education schools fall short on new ranking system

California has been trying to reform how it educates teachers for more than a decade, and some of its ideas have become a model for the rest of the country. But the vast majority of teacher preparation programs in California are still failing to adequately prepare teachers, according to a controversial new report released Tuesday that rated more than 1,200 schools of education across the nation.

The ratings, compiled by U.S. News and World Report and the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), a pro-accountability advocacy group, are part of an effort to spur improvements in teacher quality. The hope is that if education schools are pushed to do a better job of preparing teachers in the first place, the country can solve many of its academic problems.

“We have scratched an inch deep into the surface of these programs. Just going that deep we find fundamental flaws and weaknesses,” said Kate Walsh, NCTQ’s president. “I wonder if you went a lot deeper what you would find.”

Education schools across the country fared poorly, but California, which is among the top six producers of teachers in the nation, was identified as one of the three worst states at training teachers. Ninety percent of the state’s elementary education programs included in the review received the lowest rating possible.

The ratings left schools of education reeling. Some of the nation’s biggest producers of teachers, like Illinois State University and the California State University system, were rated poorly on the review’s scale of zero to four stars.

The ratings were based on standards such as how the program teaches classroom management and whether it prepares teachers for the new Common Core State Standards. For the 162 programs identified as the weakest in the nation, the common thread was low admission criteria and poor student teaching requirements.

But critics say that had NCTQ dug deeper, the group might have made different conclusions.

“Unfortunately, the answer to the question of what we can learn about teacher education quality from the NCTQ report … is ‘not much,’ ” said Linda Darling-Hammond, a professor of education at Stanford University and chair of the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, in a statement. “Without reliable data related to what programs and their candidates actually do, the study is not useful for driving improvement.”

In particular, Darling-Hammond said, the report did not accurately reflect the results of ongoing reform efforts in California.

In 1998, the state passed an ambitious law aimed at improving teacher preparation. The law allowed for multiple ways for teachers to earn a certificate and required that aspiring teachers take a performance test—which includes videotapes and extended essays—to prove they are ready to teach. One of those tests is the model for a new national exam adopted by 25 states.

Still, educators at some of California’s most popular schools of education have admitted there is little data showing their programs are any better. Some aspects of teacher preparation, like student teaching, still vary greatly by program and the state cut score for program admissions is low, just 123 out of a top score of 240 on a basic skills test.

The release of the rankings has many questioning how to evaluate teacher preparation programs, and if it is even possible.

The best way, some experts and teacher educators say, is to examine how students perform once a graduate enters the classroom. The NCTQ report was unable to include student achievement data in its ratings, except for in one case, because not enough states collect it.

“Until we have a system that gives us data and evidence of what’s going on, all we have are perceptions of people saying colleges and schools of education aren’t doing a good job,” said Karen Gallagher, dean of the education school at University of Southern California in a February interview.

But gathering that information—which is usually based on student test scores—is difficult and fraught with problems.

Instead, NCTQ used information like course syllabi, textbooks, and admissions requirements. They requested information from 2,400 programs in 1,130 institutions, but only 1,200 programs provided enough data to receive a complete program ranking. Schools in at least five states refused to hand over information until forced to by open-records requests.

In a July 2011 letter to NCTQ, former chancellor of California State University, Charles Reed, questioned whether the data collected was a “valid approach for drawing conclusions about program quality and effectiveness.”

Walsh has defended NCTQ’s methods, and insisted that the review’s methodology was fair and unbiased.

The California State University system, which has educated 8 percent of America’s teachers in the last decade, received relatively low rankings, with 18 of its 39 programs receiving the lowest rating possible. The remaining 20 received a score between one and two-and-a-half stars.

On Tuesday, the executive vice chancellor of California State University, Ephraim P. Smith, said the system’s teacher preparation programs “have long been recognized for their innovation and excellence,” and pointed to a recent federally-commissioned report that highlighted the school’s work.

Although experts across education agree that teacher preparation must be improved, many doubt that the ratings will actually help.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, a national teachers union, lambasted the review. “It’s disappointing that for something as important as strengthening teacher preparation programs, NCTQ chose to use the gimmick of a four-star rating system without using professionally accepted standards, visiting any of the institutions or talking with any of the graduates,” Weingarten said.