LA Times Writes Another Value-Added Story

Here's how they frame their story:

For L.A., possible lessons in D.C.'s controversial teacher evaluation system

By Teresa Watanabe, Los Angeles Times

In school districts including Washington's, New York's and Houston's, officials are using a method called 'value-added' to bring a measure of objectivity to the process. But virtually no one endorses it as the sole gauge of an instructor.

Even before I read the story, the first thing I thought was - wait a minute! When you hand out rankings according to value-added analysis of test scores and hold teacher employment and pay captive to those rankings, you are implicitly endorsing it as the sole gauge of an instructor.

That's the deal. That's it.

When the LA Times put a caveat at the bottom of their August value-added analysis story that said this was just one measure of a teacher's performance, NOBODY read it.

All anybody, including the fourteen year vet who was declared "ineffective" by the LA Times and later committed suicide, saw was the rankings.

So stop with this jive that value-added is just one measure of teacher effectiveness.

When the rankings are published in the papers and teacher pay, tenure and employment is tied to those rankings, it is effectively the ONLY gauge of teacher effectiveness.

The Morally Bankrupt Culture Of The LA Times

The NY Times is running a story about the moral and financial bankruptcy of the Tribune Company, the group that owns the LA Times.

Before we get to that story, I want to remind you that the LA Times ran the controversial "value-added stories" about teachers back in August, using seven years of test scores to compare teachers and declare some "effective," and some "ineffective."

The LA Times claimed the moral high ground with the stories - saying the data was available and should be used to rate teachers as either good or bad.

Since the LAUSD wasn't going to use it to do that, they would.

Never mind that the test scores that they used to rate teachers had not been designed for that task.

Never mind that the value-added analysis they used had a 20% margin of error.

Never mind all of that - the LA Times, moral arbiter for all, decided they could judge teachers "effective" or "ineffective" with their value-added analysis and then publish the names.

Pretty arrogant of them, right?

But you know, when people think they have the moral high ground, they can often be insufferable.

Now, keeping in mind all the moralizing the LA Times people did over the test scores stories, take a look at just how morally and financially bankrupt the owner of the LA Times, the Tribune Company, is:

In January 2008, soon after the venerable Tribune Company was sold for $8.2 billion, Randy Michaels, a new top executive, ran into several other senior colleagues at the InterContinental Hotel next to the Tribune Tower in Chicago.

Mr. Michaels, a former radio executive and disc jockey, had been handpicked by Sam Zell, a billionaire who was the new controlling shareholder, to run much of the media company’s vast collection of properties, including The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, WGN America and The Chicago Cubs.

After Mr. Michaels arrived, according to two people at the bar that night, he sat down and said, “watch this,” and offered the waitress $100 to show him her breasts. The group sat dumbfounded.

“Here was this guy, who was responsible for all these people, getting drunk in front of senior people and saying this to a waitress who many of us knew,” said one of the Tribune executives present, who declined to be identified because he had left the company and did not want to be quoted criticizing a former employer. “I have never seen anything like it.”

...

It was a preview of what would become a rugged ride under the new ownership. Mr. Zell and Mr. Michaels, who was promoted to chief executive of the Tribune Company in December 2009, arrived with much fanfare, suggesting they were going to breathe innovation and reinvention into the conservative company.

By all accounts, the reinvention did not go well. At a time when the media industry has struggled, the debt-ridden Tribune Company has done even worse. Less than a year after Mr. Zell bought the company, it tipped into bankruptcy, listing $7.6 billion in assets against a debt of $13 billion, making it the largest bankruptcy in the history of the American media industry. More than 4,200 people have lost jobs since the purchase, while resources for the Tribune newspapers and television stations have been slashed.

The new management did transform the work culture, however. Based on interviews with more than 20 employees and former employees of Tribune, Mr. Michaels’s and his executives’ use of sexual innuendo, poisonous workplace banter and profane invective shocked and offended people throughout the company. Tribune Tower, the architectural symbol of the staid company, came to resemble a frat house, complete with poker parties, juke boxes and pervasive sex talk.

The company said Mr. Michaels had the support of the board.

“Randy is a tremendous motivator, very charismatic, but he is very nontraditional,” said Frank Wood, a member of the Tribune board. “He has the kind of approach that motivates many people and offends others, but we think he’s done a great job.”

The company is now frozen in what seems to be an endless effort to emerge from bankruptcy. (The case entered mediation in September after negotiations failed, and a new agreement between two primary lenders was recently announced.) But even as the company foundered, the tight circle of executives, many with longtime ties to Mr. Michaels, received tens of millions of dollars in bonuses.

Behind the collapse of the Tribune deal and the bankruptcy is a classic example of financial hubris. Mr. Zell, a hard-charging real estate mogul with virtually no experience in the newspaper business, decided that a deal financed with heavy borrowing and followed with aggressive cost-cutting could succeed where the longtime Tribune executives he derided as bureaucrats had failed.

And while many media companies tried cost-cutting and new tactics in the last few years, Tribune was particularly aggressive in planning publicity stunts and in mixing advertising with editorial material. Those efforts alienated longtime employees and audiences in the communities its newspapers served.

“They threw out what Tribune had stood for, quality journalism and a real brand integrity, and in just a year, pushed it down into mud and bankruptcy,” said Ken Doctor, a newspaper analyst with Outsell Inc., a consulting firm. “And it’s been wallowing there for the last 20 months with no end in sight.”

Now ask yourself, did the LA Times publish the stories with the value-added analysis scores (with their 20% MOE) as an exercise in "quality journalism" and "integrity" or as a "publicity stunt" that wound up alienating audiences in the communities the newspaper served?

At the end of the day, what we really have here with the LA Times, a newspaper owned by a sleazy real estate mogul and managed by sex-obsessed former radio disc jockey who created a culture of "sexual innuendo, poisonous workplace banter and profane invective" and who ran the larger company into bankruptcy in one year, is a media company claiming the moral high ground on their value-added analysis of teachers when what they really wanted to do was make a big splash and sell papers.

It is unfortunate that so many humans were hurt in the process, including one teacher declared "ineffective" by the LA Times who committed suicide last month.

But I guess when you're trying to sell papers and turn around a bankrupt business deal, what's a few lives here and there.

Hell, there will always be more teachers where that one came from.

Teacher Kills himself After LA Times Declares Him "Ineffective"

Now the ed deform movement has blood on its hands:

A missing schoolteacher from South Gate apparently committed suicide in the Angeles National Forest, it was reported Sunday.

Rigoberto Ruelas, 39, a teacher at Miramonte Elementary School, was last seen last Sunday dropping off a present for his sister's birthday, according to the South Gate Police Department.

Ruelas notified the school he would need a substitute teacher assigned for his classes on Monday and Tuesday, but he did not show up to work on Wednesday and had not called in, police said. His family reported him missing that day.

Ruelas' body was found just before 9 a.m. in the forest, said Deputy Jeff Gordon of the Sheriff's Headquarters Bureau.
"(Sheriff's deputies) had been conducting training exercises near the Big Tujunga Canyon area of the Angeles National Forest," he said. "On Big Tujunga Canyon Road near mile marker 6.6, they located a vehicle connected to Rigoberto Ruelas, who had been reported missing. A subsequent search in the ravine approximately 100 feet below a nearby bridge lead to the discovery of Rigoberto Ruelas, who was deceased."

Suicide was suspected, authorities reportedly said.

Family members told a TV station that he scored low on a teacher rating report recently published by the Los Angeles Times, and that may have caused Ruelas to go missing.

The newspaper's database lists Ruelas as being "less effective than average overall," "Less effective than average in math," and "average in English."

The Times' analysis of teacher performance took into account available student scores on standardized tests between 2002 and 2009.

"The value-added scores reflect a teacher's effectiveness at raising standardized test scores and, as such, capture only one aspect of a teacher's work," reads a disclaimer on the online database of teachers.

"Although value-added measures do not capture everything that goes into making a good teacher or school, The Times decided to make the ratings available because they bear on the performance of public employees who provide an important service, and in the belief that parents and the public have a right to the information," according to the website.

The study looked at about 6,000 third-, fourth- and fifth-grade teachers at 470 Los Angeles elementary schools.

Family members reportedly said Ruelas had been a teacher for 14 years, with near perfect attendance.

14 year veteran, near perfect attendance, declared "ineffective" by the scum at the LA Times using their value-added jive, now he's dead.

Wonder if the education experts at the NBC Education Nation will talk about this tomorrow.

No, who am I kidding.

I know they won't.

They don't care about stuff like this.

Hell, they LIKE stuff like this.

Nothing like cutting payroll AND avoiding pension payouts.

Not enough bad stuff can happen to these people.

Seriously.

POSTSCRIPT: Write to the journalists who worked on the LA Times value-added analysis article and let 'em know they have blood on their hands.

E-mail address format: Firstname.Lastname@latimes.com

Here are the names of the journalists:

Jason Song, Jason Felch and Doug Smith

I am not an advocate of violence, but tonight I feel like doing a value-added analysis upside their heads.

They Have No Idea What To Do

Clearly our data-loving president is getting the idea that economic data isn't looking so hot and he just might have to fire himself, close down the White House and re-open it as a charter school:

VINEYARD HAVEN, Mass., Aug 25 (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama held a conference call with top economic advisers on Wednesday to discuss newly released grim data that has raised fears the economy is at risk of a new downturn.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and White House advisers Christy Romer and Larry Summers took part in the call with the president, who is vacationing on the Massachusetts island of Martha's Vineyard.

Government reports on Wednesday showed new single-family home sales slumped to the slowest pace on record in July and orders for costly durable goods were soft, heightening fears about the economy's direction. [N25121445]

"The discussion focused on recent data reports, global markets and economic growth," the White House said in a statement describing the call.

"The economic team provided an update on the next steps to keep the economy growing, including assistance to small businesses and the extension of tax cuts to the middle class," it said.

Yeah, they have not freaking clue what to do.

And maybe there is nothing that can be done to keep the economy from sliding back into recession and unemployment from hitting double digits again.

The time to do something was in 2009 when they could have REALLY done some stimulus - put people on the payroll, trained them for jobs, sent them out to rebuild roads, bridges, infrastructure, subways, light rail, high speed rail, and the electrical grid.

But instead we got Race to the Top.

And talk about deficit reduction.

So now here we are, with Obama breaking up Vacation # 6 for a call with his economic team to hear them all say "I dunno...what do you want to do?"

Heckuva job, Barack.

It's a good thing accountability is only for teachers.

If Arne Duncan was your boss, you'd be called out as a "bad president" in the LA Times and put on a list to be fired.

Naming Names

Create any old value-added assessment you want.

Use tests that were never meant to be used for value-added assessment.

Run the scores through a computer and come up with a list of "good teachers" and "bad teachers."

Publish those names in the LA Times on Sunday.

Have the Obama administration publicly endorse the publication through a statement by the Secretary of Education.

Never mind that the tests were not meant to judge teachers.

Never mind that they way the analysis was conducted leaves the end product open to a margin of error the size of Obama's ego.

They're going to go with this Naming Names strategy as a way to publicly shame "bad teachers" out of their jobs.

I think they hope parents will see the names in the paper and demand that the teachers be fired.

Or perhaps they hope parents will take justice into their own hands vigilante-style.

Because that's kind of what this is.

Okay, forget the "kind of" part.

That's what this is.

They publish the names of tax cheats in the papers.

They publish the names of deadbeat dads and parents not paying alimony and child support.

They publish the names of johns arrested for soliciting prostitutes.

They publish the names of people arrested for DWI.

They publish the names of sex offenders.

And now they publish the names of "bad teachers."

Who cares if the analysis used to come to those conclusions is flawed?

The point is to get "bad teachers" out of the system.

And now that the Obama administration has publicly endorsed this action, you can be sure we will see similar articles all around the country.

I bet the Wall Street Journal - exceedingly pro-charter and pro-"reform" since Rupert Murdoch took it over - is working on such an article about NYC right now.

Perhaps Zuckerman has his minions at either the Daily News or US News working on one (US News loves to publish lists - Best Colleges, Best Medical Schools, Best Graduation Schools...Worst Secondary School Teachers fits right in with the rest of the reductionism that passes for analysis at that rag.)

Whenever I have juniors or seniors talk about wanting to go into teaching these days, I always say you might want to rethink that career choice.

Teachers are under attack from all sides - from Bloomberg and Klein here at the city level to Paterson (and soon Cuomo) at the state level to Obama and Duncan at the federal level (and Bush and Spellings before them.)

Billionaire slave labor employers like Steve Jobs want to see us fired and the unions busted.

Predator philanthropists like Bill Gates and Eli Broad put up millions to bring that dream to fruition.

Hedge fund criminals like Whitney Tilson start "education reform" non-profits that work toward the hedge fundie wet dream of a completely privatized public school system open to billions of EMO profits.

And our unions, rather than fight these attacks with all they've got, either stick their heads in the sand and make believe they're not happening or actually collaborate and invite the enemy into the city (as Weingarten did by having Bill Gates speak at the AFT convention.)

These are bad times for the country at large.

The economy has been terrible and it's getting worse even as I write this post.

The unemployment rate is 9.5% and going higher by the end of the year.

The underemployment rate is 19% and going higher by the end of the year.

GDP is expected to slip to 1.2% or lower for Q2 and hover near 0% for the second half of the year.

Foreclosures have increased every month for the last thirteen months and with over a year's worth of housing inventory on the market and prices still needing to fall to get back to a historical home price/income ratio, the housing crisis is going to get worse before it gets better too.

What is being done about any of this?

Not much - other than to blame the public school system and public school teachers for not teaching the skills needed to survive this uber-corporate 21st century economy.

It's not our fault, of course.

The predator billionaires and hedge fund criminals run things on Wall Street and in Washington.

They steal as much as they can from the economy without putting anything back in the form of either investment or hiring.

They nearly brought about economic collapse in 2008 and rather than be punished for their crimes and hubris, they are bailed out by both Bush and Obama and allowed to continue to run the economy like a rigged casino.

And now, rather than just blame teachers for this mess they did NOT create, the powers that be have decided to name names and get some vigilante justice going.

Don't be surprised if that isn't the plan.

Do you think Michelle Rhee or Joel Klein would be sorry to see outraged parents take to a classroom to themselves "fire" a teacher rated "bad" by some newspaper through some jive value-added analysis story?

How about Duncan and Obama?

I don't know about you, but I could absolutely see Rhee shrugging if some crazy parent or parents, angry that their kid has been left back or is struggling below grade level, took to a classroom and punched some teacher exposed as "bad" by the local newspaper.

I could absolutely hear Rhee say "If bad teachers refuse to step down themselves and teachers unions try and protect bad teachers from firing, then maybe parents have to take action themselves."

The point, apparently, is just to get rid of "bad teachers."

Doesn't matter how you do it. Doesn't matter how you measure it.

Just that it happens.

These are bad times indeed.