My Take on the L.A. Times Reanalysis
by Frederick M. Hess • Feb 11, 2011 at 10:35 am
Cross-posted from Education Week
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ShareLast summer, the Los Angeles Times created a furor with its hotly debated decision to post the value-added scores for thousands of Los Angeles teachers and to identify individual teachers, by name, as more or less effective. This week, the situation roared back to life when University of Colorado professor Derek Briggs, and coauthor Ben Domingue, issued a report titled "Due Diligence and the Evaluation of Teachers" which charged that the L.A. Times analysis was "based on unreliable and invalid research" and that the use of an alternative value-added model might have changed how half of 3,300 fifth-grade teachers were rated when it came to reading. Even the Huffington Post has got into the action, running a solid post by Chuck Kerchner.
The issue has been rife with drama, with the L.A. Times breaking the story on an examination of its own
