By Ben Boychuk

If newspapers are indeed dying, at least a few seem willing to die fighting. Consider the Los Angeles Times (ward of the bankrupt Tribune Co.), which on Sunday published a surprisingly bold piece of investigative journalism on arguably the most pressing subject of our day: Public education. The story should serve as an example of how a cultural institution—even one as embattled as the mainstream media—can use transparency to influence society in a positive way.

In case you missed it, Times reporters Jason Felch, Jason Song and Doug Smith used California’s public records law to obtain seven years of math and English test scores from the Los Angeles Unified School District. They asked Richard Buddin, a well-respected analyst at the RAND Corporation, to run the numbers and estimate teacher effectiveness — just as many states around the country are considering, and in a few cases starting to do.

The story is an eye-opener. The Times didn’t just present the results; it named names. Much of this sort of data never sees the light of day. What’s more, according to the story: “The district has had the ability to analyze the differences among teachers for years but opted not to do so, in large part because of anticipated union resistance.”

And how. Predictably the United Teachers of Los Angeles, LAUSD’s powerful teachers union, responded to the story by calling on its 40,000 members to cancel their newspaper subscriptions and boycott the paper. A.J. Duffy, a union boss straight out of Central Casting, angrily denounced the Times. “You’re leading people in a dangerous direction, making it seem like you can judge the quality of a teacher by…a test.”

Of course not. But the story is more complicated (and more nuanced) than Duffy makes it out to be. Budden employed something called “value-added analysis,” which rates teachers based on their students’ progress on standardized tests from year to year. Several other states, including Colorado and Tennessee, and Washington, DC, have adopted or are adopting similar methods for evaluating teachers.

The reaction to the story has been as fascinating as the story itself. Check out a couple of the letters to the editor the Times published yesterday:

If Duffy has data showing how students benefit from the current seniority system, he should share that data; otherwise, he should pay attention to what the Times has to say. He might learn something. Even the two ‘ineffective’ teachers you identified in Sunday’s article showed more concern for the success of students than Duffy seems to have.

My wife is an L.A. Unified teacher with more than 20 years of service. She and I had a spirited discussion Sunday morning about the “value added” analysis of teachers undertaken by the Times. Mere hours later, our phone rang with a pre-recorded message from UTLA President A.J. Duffy urging union members like my wife to respond by canceling their subscriptions to the Times. Just how this otherwise irresponsible and cowardly call to action will help solve the education crisis that is LAUSD I am uncertain, but I am considering getting a second subscription for myself and my family.

Jay P. Greene, 21st Century Chair in Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, lauded the Times at his eponymous group weblog.

“It’s no longer possible to hide the fact that there are some awful teachers who continue receiving paychecks and depriving kids of an education,” he wrote. “School officials have had these data for years and never used them, never tried to identify who were the best and worst teachers, and never tried to remove bad teachers from the profession. It took a newspaper and a big [freedom of information] request.”

Greene also says critics of No Child Left Behind may need to rethink at least some of their opposition to the law in light of the Times reporters’ findings.

The accountability and choice provisions of NCLB could never work because school systems could never be asked to sanction themselves,” Greene wrote. “But the one big thing that NCLB accomplished is getting every public school to measure student achievement in grades 3-8 and report results.

“NCLB made it so that these data exist so that the L.A. Times could [obtain] the results and push schools to act upon it. NCLB could never get schools to take real action, but the existence of the data could get others to force schools to act.”

The newspaper’s decision to publish not just the data but also the names of teachers elicited surprise from Elena Silva, senior policy analyst at Education Sector, a Washington, DC-based think tank.

Hearing that teacher performance data will become public is different from actually seeing it on the front page of a newspaper,” Silva wrote on The Quick and the Ed weblog. “Having spent time studying Tennessee’s value added system, and all of the privacy protections that surround it, I was pretty shocked to see that John Smith, one of the teachers profiled in the Times’ article, isn’t a pseudonym but a real teacher—and one of the ‘bad’ ones.

Education writer Alexander Russo was more critical of the newspaper’s decision to name names:

“Even if you’re a big fan of value-added measurements of teacher performance, the L.A. Times’ decision to post names and ratings of individual teachers might give you some pause,” Russo wrote at his weblog, This Week in Education.

“It’s one thing to evaluate, rate and even pay teachers based on test scores, but another thing to make those ratings public,” he wrote. “In fact, some states prohibit the release of this information based on it being a personnel issue. Others prohibit it because the technology for evaluating test data and linking it to teachers is so uncertain.”

But Silva argues, in spite of any misgivings about privacy, the Times story breaks new ground in transparency and disclosure in education reform.

“There is, in fact, zero debate that we should but don’t have a good way to evaluate the performance of the 3 million plus teachers that matter so much for student success,” Silva wrote. “A big breakthrough story, and a database founded on millions of test scores, is sure to remind us, or force us to see, that not all teachers are alike, that some are incredibly effective and others are not.”

I think that’s right. Just about everyone acknowledges that teachers are both the key and the impediment to meaningful education reform. Teachers are the key, obviously, because they implement the standards, feel the burden of accountability measures, and work with the hard cases.

Teachers are also the impediment because their union protects the worst teachers at the expense of the best. A.J. Duffy says evaluating teachers based on “a test” leads people in a “dangerous direction.” Duffy is half-right. Evaluating teachers in any way leads people in a dangerous direction because it threatens monopoly union power. It’s well past time that power was broken.

(Cross-posted at Freedom Pub.)