Herewith, my final words on the L.A. dustup. Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute writes that he ?wanted to endorse? the Los Angeles Times's reporting but could not. Why? He is skittish about the casualness with which ?reading and math value-added calculations are being treated as de facto determinants of ?good' teaching?; he worries that L.A. students may get ?substantial pull-out instruction or work with a designated reading instructor? (which would render those students' test scores reflective of the efforts of two or more educators and not only of those of their usual classroom teachers); and he notes a ?profound failure to recognize the difference between responsible management and public transparency.? Readers of Hess know his mind is sharp as a shattered beer bottle, but in this case he has?fatefully confused the duties of public officials?and?journalists.
Take his first point. Certainly crafters of value-added systems should do their work smartly, humbly, and carefully and eschew fetishizing the product. The responsibility of a journalist, however, is not to design such systems but only to report on them and their results while offering context. Did the Times reporters not offer context when they wrote that ?Value-added ratings reflect a teacher's effectiveness at raising standardized test scores. As such, they capture only one aspect of a teacher's work, and, like any statistical analysis, they are subject to inherent error?? If a careless reader chooses to zip past this proviso it is his own business; it is not the newspaper's concern.
Hess's second point is fine so far as it goes?but it doesn't go so far. Whether or not certain pupils received pull-out instruction seems sort of small beer in relation to the Times's keg of an expos?. (Another hoppy metaphor, I know . . . no, I haven't been drinking.)
Regarding the third point?about the ?profound failure to recognize the difference between responsible management and public transparency??one trips over a lack of transparency. Who or what, precisely, is failing to recognize the difference Hess delineates? The mists return in his subsequent observation: ?Transparency for public agencies . . . 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.? The veracity of that statement depends wholly on who or what is doing the reporting.
It is likely that the who or what to which Hess refers is the Times. For one, he uses the phrase ?reporting on.? He also begins his piece by claiming that he cannot ?endorse the LAT's effort,? allowing one to assume that subsequent arguments relate to the shortcomings of that effort and the newspaper responsible for it. Thus, when Hess writes of a ?failure to recognize the difference between responsible management and public transparency,? one is on solid ground deducing that he believes that failure is the Times's, which means that he has, again, confused the duties of public organizations and the journalists who cover them. The National Guard, in order to attain ?transparency,??may not report the performance reviews of individual soldiers nor feel an obligation to do so (see here); but this has nothing at all to do with a newspaper. In fact, newspapers can, should, and frequently do do precisely this sort of reporting?whether on the performance of individual Guardsmen, teachers,?political staffers, etc.?all the time.
Hess concludes:
I'm all for building and refining these [value-added] systems and using them to evaluate, reward, and remove teachers. But I think it's a mistake to get in the business of publicly identifying individual teachers in this fashion. I think it confuses as much as it clarifies, puts more stress on primitive systems than they can bear, and promises to unnecessarily entangle a useful management tool in personalities and public reputations.
In other words, it is a mistake for the Times to publicly identify individual teachers because it may confuse readers, place stress on primitive systems, and mix up management tools with personalities. But why is any of this the Times's concern? Hess writes that he is ?for the smart use of value-added by districts or schools,? but as the Times illuminated, the Los Angeles School District was not using value-added in a smart way?it wasn't using the data in any way, including (as the Times revealed precisely by interviewing individual, named teachers) not sharing them with the low-scoring educators who could have benefited from the information.
Hess asks, ?Would it have really been such a compromise to have kept teacher names anonymous and to have reported scores by school, or community, or in terms of citywide distribution?? For so many reasons, yes.
?Liam Julian