Story line on LAT teacher evaluations leaves stuff out

LA Observed columnist Bill Boyarsky, writing for the second time on the teacher effectiveness series that has been getting so much attention pro and con for the Los Angeles Times, argues that the debate over the stories is being over-simplified.

Since the Los Angeles Times began publishing its value-added series and making available the evaluations of 6,000 elementary school teachers, the journalistic effort has become the nation’s hottest educational story and the system the source of national debate.

Meanwhile the paper and several commentators have portrayed the issue in an overly simplistic way. It goes like this: On one side are the teachers and their obstructionist union, on the other are reformers, parents, students and a gutty newspaper.

Actually, it’s much more ambiguous. An important part of the dispute is whether the evaluations are accurate and whether the Times has done enough to make the readers aware of the limitations of the concept of value-added. These points have been raised by independent academic researchers.

For his LA Observed column on the subject, Boyarsky exchanges email with Times Assistant Managing Editor editor David Lauter, who contends the appropriate caveats are all there for readers to see. Boyarsky, for those who don't know, used to be the Times' city editor as well as a columnist who wrote often on education. Here is his earlier post on the topic.