I think the Los Angeles Daily News usually does a pretty good job on their stories. This one kind of blew me away. My guess is that because the Los Angeles Times is taking on AJ Duffy and the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) with their value added analysis, the LA Daily News felt like they needed to take the opposite side, so they're acting as AJ Duffy's press agent.

As head of the nation's second-largest local teachers union, A.J. Duffy has become as well known for his color coordinated wing-tip shoes, suspenders and double-breasted suits as he has for his feisty attitude and volatile remarks.

With the build of a stocky bulldog, the Brooklyn native makes no apologies for barking and biting to defend the rights of the 45,000 teachers, substitutes and counselors he represents.

In his final year as president of United Teachers Los Angeles, Duffy says he'll remain committed to his members but he's also determined to get back to what he calls his true passion.

"School reform is what puts a fire in my belly," Duffy said, sitting at the head of the cherry wood conference table that sits at one end of his 11th floor office on Wilshire Boulevard west of downtown.

"It bothers me when people don't see both sides of me... yes, I am a firebrand but I'm also a person who has shown the ability to be calm and articulate... I've been an advocate for reform," Duffy said.

While some critics have have argued that Duffy and the union have stood in the way of reform in Los Angeles, the 66-year-old says a desire to improve schools and working conditions for teachers drove him to run for UTLA president.

"School reform is what puts a fire in [his] belly." Really? That certainly isn't the AJ Duffy that I've seen. Maybe he means fighting AGAINST school reform puts a fire in his belly. Or maybe the fire in his belly from school reform is an ulcer. Maybe that's what he means.

When the LA Times published the first of their now famous value added analysis stories, AJ's response wasn't to have a "calm and articulate" discussion of the positives or negatives of a value-added analysis. His first response was to call for a boycott of the paper.

AJ says he's been "an advocate for reform." Which reform would that be exactly?

AJ and his union UTLA have fought with their masters at the California Teachers Association (CTA) and the National Education Association (NEA) to oppose each and every effort to improve public education. Whether it is 2nd grade STAR testing, reforming teacher evaluation, merit pay for teachers, school accountability or non-traditional methods of entering the teaching profession, AJ and his allies have opposed each and every one of these reforms. It is difficult to believe AJ's assertion given his complete lack of support for reforms of any kind. Read the rest of this post!

Today's question of the day comes from the Sacramento Bee in this article about the STAR score release. The question and answer section they included this question:

Should Californians be concerned about a 50 percent proficiency rate?

To answer their question..... YES! Yes, California taxpayers and parents should be concerned about the fact that only about half of our students are at grade-level each year. If we continued to gain 2 percentage points a year (the amount of this year's gain) it would take us more than 20 years to get almost all of our students to grade-level. That's a whole generation of our students. Read the rest of this post!

Probably the biggest story in education this week is the value-added analysis done by the Los Angeles Times looking at the impact of individual teachers on student academic performance.

Though the government spends billions of dollars every year on education, relatively little of the money has gone to figuring out which teachers are effective and why.

Seeking to shed light on the problem, The Times obtained seven years of math and English test scores from the Los Angeles Unified School District and used the information to estimate the effectiveness of L.A. teachers — something the district could do but has not.

The Times used a statistical approach known as value-added analysis, which rates teachers based on their students' progress on standardized tests from year to year. Each student's performance is compared with his or her own in past years, which largely controls for outside influences often blamed for academic failure: poverty, prior learning and other factors.

Though controversial among teachers and others, the method has been increasingly embraced by education leaders and policymakers across the country, including the Obama administration.

In coming months, The Times will publish a series of articles and a database analyzing individual teachers' effectiveness in the nation's second-largest school district — the first time, experts say, such information has been made public anywhere in the country.

This article examines the performance of more than 6,000 third- through fifth-grade teachers for whom reliable data were available.

The Los Angeles Times is creating a database of their findings so that parents can look up the teachers in their neighborhood school and see which class they want their child to be in. They also shared some general findings: Read the rest of this post!

I thought this op ed by Jane Hathaway in the USA Today was an interesting perspective on teacher evaluation.

Washington, D.C., is front and center taking on the challenge. For decades here and in school districts coast to coast, seniority provided what seemed to be a fair, transparent and moderately efficient layoff strategy. Years in the classroom can be counted with little dispute. Districts viewed teachers as largely interchangeable, and students were presumed to be largely untouched by personnel matters.

If anything, more experienced teachers — those protected by seniority — were assumed to be better than younger instructors. Meanwhile, greater employment security rewarded loyal employees, no doubt fostering good management and teacher relations. It all worked smoothly.

That was then. Today, things are different. Thanks to more and better data about individual students and teachers, we can base policies on a truer understanding of what goes on in schools.

We know, because of research from the federally funded National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) — and elsewhere, that the differences in teacher effectiveness, as measured by tested student achievement gains, are huge. Strong teachers get nearly triple the results that weak teachers get with their students.

So which teachers stay and which leave matters.

The Assembly Republican Caucus released this document providing statistics on "California Private Sector Job Loss vs. State Employee Job Cost." The key numbers are:

Real Facts: California Private Sector Job Loss vs. State Employee Job Cost

12.3%	California Unemployment Rate
2.24M	Californians currently listed as unemployed
-1,298,700	Private sector jobs lost in California since 2005
+38,100	State government jobs added since 2005
$55,000	Average California private sector job salary
$3,600	Average state taxes paid by each private sector employee
$90,000	Average cost to taxpayers to pay salary and benefits for each California government job
25	Private sector jobs it takes to support one government job