On Sunday, the Los Angeles Times caused quite a stir by releasing individual performance data about 6,000 of the system’s primary teachers after weeks of hyping the story. The paper took the simple but ingenious step of filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the district’s raw math and reading standardized test scores over several years. For each teacher, the paper calculated a score based on the gains shown by his or her individual students from the time they arrived in the classroom in the fall to the time they left—a value-added score—and then rated the teachers’ effectiveness.

Information is power, and the school system and teachers union had access to this data long before the Times. But instead of releasing scores—and thus seizing the opportunity to frame the information and the debate—they sat on the data for years, stalling, hoping no one would notice that it existed at all. Their mindset dates from a time when processing a large amount of data and offering a granular analysis was a difficult and expensive business. But number crunching on this scale is no longer the province of big bureaucracies with major computing power. Anyone can do it, and it was only a matter of time before someone did.

Naturally, the teachers union flipped out. In addition to announcing a boycott of the paper, union reps have condemned the release of the scores to parents as “dangerous.” (To his credit, Obama education chief Arne Duncan backed the release of the scores, saying “What’s there to hide?”)

But all the data in the world won’t do kids or their parents any good if they can’t make choices informed by that data.

continue… http://reason.com/archives/2010/09/01/knowing-is-half-the-battle-but