The Los Angeles Times began on Sunday a series of articles in which it?is publicizing the findings of a value-added analysis it conducted of seven years of English and math test scores of Los Angeles Unified School District students. And the paper is naming names:
With Miguel Aguilar, students consistently have made striking gains on state standardized tests, many of them vaulting from the bottom third of students in Los Angeles schools to well above average, according to a Times analysis. John Smith's pupils next door have started out slightly ahead of Aguilar's but by the end of the year have been far behind.
All this has ruffled A.J. Duffy's feathers, so much so that Duffy, president of the Los Angeles teachers' union, has promised a ?massive boycott? of the Times by members of his and other local unions. ?You're leading people in a dangerous direction, making it seem like you can judge the quality of a teacher by . . . a test,? Duffy said.
It is one thing for a newspaper to publish the name of a teacher who, say, sips whiskey at his desk and romantically pursues his pupils and quite another to print the name of a teacher who simply is not doing his job as well as a colleague down the hall. The former practice is fine, the latter is questionable. For the Times's beef is not really with individual teachers but with the district and union, which have long known of disparities in teachers' performance but have, according to the paper, ?opted mostly to ignore them.? For instance, Karen Caruso, a veteran third-grade teacher whom the paper describes as a diligent worker, and whose principal praises her, ?said she was surprised and disappointed by her [low test score] results? but also ?said the numbers were important and, like several other teachers interviewed, wondered why she hadn't been shown such data before by anyone in the district? (my emphasis).
Here is the ingenious thing about this first piece in the Times series: By naming names, by highlighting individual teachers, the paper makes teachers, even the struggling ones, look better and the district and union look worse. That's counterintuitive but true. The Times crystallizes the point that the district and union have acted shamefully by not only hiding performance data from the public but hiding?them from individual teachers themselves?teachers who, it appears, want to see them and want to learn from them. Duffy's touchy, petulant, thuggish response has only reinforced the importance and veracity of the Times's work.
?Liam Julian