LA Times...WTH?

Graphic retrieved by http://www.facebook.com/BoycottLATimes?ref=ts

Speaking of test-based teacher evaluation, over two weeks ago, the Los Angeles (LA) Times, the 2nd largest newspaper in the country, went on a blazing assault on teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District. What they did was indefensible and cruel. In its effort to better inform the public on teacher effectiveness in this school district, the LA Times commissioned its own value-added modeling analysis of student academic growth based solely on standardized test scores, using only one researcher by the way, and published a database of effective and ineffective teachers based on the findings of this analysis. This was so wrong on so many levels. Public education advocate Barnett Berry and countless others have expressed their disfavor of the senseless action done by the LA Times. Based on what I know so far, this is my assessment:

• The LA Times did this without the consent and support of the teachers. Can they do it? Sure; we teachers are public employees. Should they have done it? No; you leave that to the EXPERTS. Just because the LONE researcher who conducted the analysis is from RAND Corporation doesn't mean anything.
• There are countless research studies done by respectable education researchers who discouraged the use of test-based teacher evaluation (e.g., see my blog entry on Relying Heavily of Student Test Scores to Access Teacher Effectiveness...Negative!)
• The analysis was not thoroughly done since several factors, as stated in Berry and Rick Hess's blogs, were ignored; these factors can greatly influenced student performances on these standardized tests.
• All the newspaper did was further politicized the issue of teacher evaluation by perpetuating the notion that student test scores alone determine teacher effectiveness, which is so far from the truth.

The newspaper's publicized motivation is to merely inform the public; "the public has the right to know". No one disagrees with that. However, in his blog entry, Rick Hess has eloquently implied that the newspaper forgot its public role:

Third, there's a profound failure to recognize the difference between responsible management and public transparency. Transparency for public agencies entails knowing how their money is spent, how they're faring, and expecting organizational leaders to report on organizational performance. It typically doesn't entail reporting on how many traffic citations individual LAPD officers issued or what kind of performance review a National Guardsman was given by his commanding officer. Why? Because we recognize that these data are inevitably imperfect, limited measures and that using them sensibly requires judgment. Sensible judgment becomes much more difficult when decisions are made in the glare of the public eye.

LA Times -- Know your role. Inform the masses with factual and logical information. Stop spreading senseless propaganda.  Shame on you!

FYI...If you have a Facebook account, there is a fan page called Boycott LA Times, which has additional links to several articles and op-eds on this newspaper's blunder.