Teachers, Unions, and Transparency

by Kate Piercy From S.T. Karnick at The American Culture: In case you missed it, LA 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,...

by Kate Piercy

From S.T. Karnick at The American Culture:

In case you missed it, LA 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 was 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.”

The story has created an interesting response, from teachers, unions, education scholars and more. See here for some reactions and the full story, including remarks from Jay P. Greene, 21st Century Chair in Education Reform at the University of Arkansas:

“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.”

Transparency is a great tool for measuring what government programs, or in this case, which teachers, are performing well or poorly. Increased transparency can mean increased government accountability, but only if government receives continued pressure from the public and media and fully utilizes this tool.

For the full story on the LA Times piece, click here.