Remember that the LA Times created a firestorm in 2010 when it created value added ratings for teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District and released the names and ratings of thousands of teachers. Arne Duncan said it was a good idea, but many researchers warned that the ratings were volatile, inaccurate, and unstable. And others saw a violation of confidentiality as well as ethical issues. In the aftermath, a teacher named Roberto Riguelas committed suicide, and his family said he was depressed to see what he thought was an unfair rating of his work.
New York City released the teacher ratings earlier this year, and again there were many complaints about inaccuracy. This time, Bill Gates published an op-Ed opposing the practice on grounds that it makes it impossible for supervisors to counsel teachers when their ratings are published.
Be all that as it may, the Los Angeles Times is now suing LAUSD for access to teachers’ names so they can release their ratings again.
I am still trying to understand what the newspaper thinks it is accomplishing, what purpose is served other than selling papers.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The LA Times “education” writers have for years been enthralled with the charter schools and are incapable of doing any independent reportage. I used to wonder whether there had to be some sort of swapping of favors for the favorable coverage, since the coverage did not remotely resemble what I saw from Inside the charter schools. Later, I came to realize that the reporters were just lazy, and accepted everything they were told by the charter crowd even though a simple trip through the public test scores would have revealed that many of their “facts” were false. The only explanation I can give for the Times’ hobby horse is that they paid some economist (note: not a testing expert like Dan Koretz or a statistician or anyone with expertise in testing, but an economist who only knows linear regression) a lot of money to analyze the figures. Garbage in, garbage out is not anything the Times’ or their paid-for economists choose to understand.
I think that Eli Broad, who lives in LA and has too much influence in that city in terms of education, has something to do with this.
Also, newspapers like the Times in LA and Seattle have been bought and have taken the side of big money.
What they want to do is pointless, irrational and hurtful but they will do it because there are other influences behind the scenes at work.
Someone should investigate it further.
Dora
What is really scary is that test scores can be artificially inflated through a variety of means yet the kids may have very poor writing skills and research skills. The CST is an archaic test and I think as teachers, we need to sue to prevent the release if our union won’t support us.
If the public only knew how truly useless this “data” is and how it reflects outside experiences, truancy, etc. It tells you virtually nothing about the teacher but tells us a whole lot about the surrounding community. I think teachers need to sue to demand that authentic assessment be used to judge them. We can’t depend on UTLA for help- we need to sue individually and clog up the courts.
……hmmmmm, selling papers is all that matters because the money is all that matters. Thoughtful decision making? Thrown out with the baby and the bathwater.
The LA Times is owned by the Chicago Tribune. Here – once again – is what Stand for Children’s Jonah Edelman had to say about the Tribune editorial writers’ support of the bill called IL SB 7 which inspired the strike.
Q. What was the role of media in this process? You know, generally speaking you try to bring media on board with you, but this sounds like it was a much more underground thing?
JONAH EDELMAN
A. No, I’m glad you asked that. The Tribune was fantastic. I think they probaby wrote more than ten supportive editorials, prominent, top well written. I think Paul Weingarten was responsible for a lot of those. The Sun-Times was good. We had a lot of down state editorial support. It didn’t become a big flashpoint, and so on the news side it didn’t get so much attention. It did after it passed get a lot of attention. But editorial support was terrific, but I wouldn’t call it anywhere near a decisive variable.
The LA Times and the Chicago Tribune support Obama/Duncan/Emanuel’s Race to the Trough.
Aw heck, why stop with merely publishing teacher names? I think we should round up all the teachers in the bottom third or so (preferrably in the early hours of the morning, still in their jammies), herd them all to the public square where we let the real patriotic Americans jeer and throw rotten food at them, then we can load them all into open trucks and take them to special camps for re-education.
The great thing is that since there’s a lot of variation in these scores year to year, we’ll have a whole new group in the bottom third the following year and we can do it all over again.
Of course I’m being sarcastic, but I wouldn’t entirely be surprised to see things like that happening in the foreseeable future. The madness is getting out of hand, yet so few people see it.
There is a positive side to making the teacher ratings public. Parents and students will be able to see the bogosity (inventing this word) of value added rankings for themselves. Once they see that great teachers are being labeled ineffective and that these same teachers may be fired because of faulty rankings, then they might begin to rise up against this insanity.
Selling newspapers is what the business is all about… and horse-races sell more papers than explanations about how the races are rigged, especially when the rigging of the races is complicated… that’s why there are very few articles explaining why VAM doesn’t work… it makes sense intuitively and the math to explain why it DOESN’T work is complicated…
I don’t know about that. The news media have been pretty happy to bust the common sense “myth” that smaller class sizes are better, even though the research that allegedly shows that smaller class sizes aren’t better is rather dry and complicated. If the media had an interest in showing that VAM doesn’t work, they’d find a way to present it. But since they have an interest in exactly the opposite….