It is not presumptuous to suppose that most people would react hostilely were their job-performance assessments spattered across the newsprint of a major metropolitan daily. But the teachers of Los Angeles have only their district and union to blame here. As I wrote yesterday, the Los Angeles Unified School District has long possessed value-added test-score data that identify its flourishing educators and also its ineffectual ones, and yet it has done nothing with these data, in part because of laziness and in part because?it did not want to pique the teachers' union. For the district to have had such valuable information?information that could certainly have helped individual teachers improve their lessons and classroom techniques?and ignore it indicates a fundamental and thorough abdication of its charge to educate students. Public-school parents deserve to know that. The Los Angeles Times was right to bring this situation to light, and to do so effectively it had to name names.
Diane Ravitch disagrees. She went further in her criticism than even?local union officials, calling the Times's story ?disgraceful? and fundamentally mean, and saying it ?turned her stomach.? Why the gastrointestinal distress? Because the paper uncovered serious malfeasance at a taxpayer-funded behemoth? Or because, in so doing, it identified individual teachers whose students' test scores were below average? Of course it's the latter. Ravitch ostensibly wants teachers to be regarded as professionals, yet she defends them as if they were children. Had the Times named certain doctors whose patients had below-average rates of recovery, or certain lawyers whose clients always lose, would Ravitch find those stories stomach turning? Doubtful.
?Liam Julian