Introduction

By 2009, policymakers, educators and journalists who covered schools were increasingly frustrated with the nation’s apparent inability to measure the effectiveness of its public school teachers. Standardized tests promoted nationally by the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act had begun to provide metrics of student performance. But who or what could determine whether an individual teacher was up to the job? To many who thought hard about public education and how to improve it, one possible solution was to track individual teachers according to their students’ standardized test scores. This, they hoped, would make the educators accountable for their job performance.

At the Los Angeles Times, a reporting team decided to try just that. In November 2009, reporters Jason Felch and Jason Song and their editors obtained from the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) several years of elementary school standardized test scores in math and reading. The Times then hired an education economist to analyze the data and determine how individual teachers affected their students’ test scores. By June 2010, the paper had generated a database of 6,000-plus elementary public school teachers that identified which teachers consistently raised students’ standardized test scores, and which did not. Reporters were drafting a series of stories based on the data.

But simply having the information did not necessarily mean it should be published. The project had sparked many debates within the paper since its inception. There was discussion about whether it was appropriate for a news organization to rate teachers. Who were reporters to evaluate teaching? There were also questions about the methodology, so-called “value-added” analysis—a measurement approach that, while in use in several US school districts, had vocal critics. How could editors and reporters judge whether the results from this approach were trustworthy?

The thorniest question, however, was accountability: should the Times publish individual teachers’ names? On one side stood those—mostly members of the team working on the story for nearly a year—who felt that tax dollars paid public teachers’ salaries, and thus their work should be subject to public scrutiny. They also argued that concrete rankings would allow parents to move their children from poor teachers to better ones, creating a virtuous circle that rewarded good teaching and perhaps encouraged less effective instructors to seek training or another career. On the other side stood some members of the Times’ website staff, most of them newcomers to the project, who argued against naming teachers as an unwarranted invasion of privacy. To shine such a public spotlight on individuals was, they said, simply unfair.

In June 2010, Assistant Managing Editor David Lauter won approval from the top to move forward with the project. He was anxious to publish the series on teacher rankings before the school year started in September. But the objections gave him pause. Had the Times team been blinded in its editorial judgment by the triumph of designing what they considered a successful rating system? Had the team overlooked anything crucial?  What would readers think? How would the paper handle any negative repercussions? Was it really a public service to name the teachers, or was the paper planning to publish names simply because it could?