Teacher data

In Las Vegas and in Los Angeles, school district officials have the data and the computers they need to generate reports on how children fare under each individual teacher they employ.

If, year after year, kids enter one teacher's classroom and depart with test scores which show they've advance by 1.1 grade levels, while the teacher down the hall consistently allows her kids to fall behind, isn't that something parents should know? Shouldn't the more effective teachers be celebrated?

Shouldn't teachers under whose tutelage kids don't do as well at least be told the problem so they know to seek help? In worst cases, shouldn't they be told to seek other work?

The teacher unions love to rhapsodize about their husbandry of "the future of the nation" when they seek pay hikes. But guess what: It's primarily thanks to the teacher unions that school administrators have never compiled, publicized and used these reports.

Here in Nevada, the unions prevailed upon their waterboys in Carson City to ban use of such existing test data.

In a speech Wednesday, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan called for all states and school districts to make public whether their instructors are doing enough to raise student test scores and to share other school-level information with parents. "The truth is always hard to swallow, but it can only make us better, stronger and smarter," the secretary said in Little Rock. "That's what accountability is all about -- facing the truth and taking responsibility."

In his Little Rock speech, Mr. Duncan said he was responding, in part, to the controversy in Los Angeles generated by stories in the Los Angeles Times about the failure of Los Angeles Unified to use available data to identify individual teachers who are either succeeding or failing.

Mr. Duncan is right. The data should be used to grade and reward the best teachers. It should also be made public, allowing parents to choose their kids' teachers.

For that matter, data on the schools themselves must be made public, and parents allowed to opt out of schools that consistently fail their students.

The most expensive school systems in the history of the world are producing "graduates" who can barely spell their way out of a paper bag, who can't conjugate a verb or tell a noun from an adjective, who can barely count change -- all skills once expected of grade school kids.

Enough is enough.