The gentleman from the Los Angeles Times sounded more like a press secretary for a politician rather than a member of the press corps. He put a spin on everything the research methodologist from Boulder found, and even put a spin on a caller's comment. The Times needs to get back to the business of reporting the news rather than massaging it.
Mike Rose, comment in response to Patt Morrison radio show on the L.A. Times “value-added” teacher analysis.
Derek Briggs and Ben Domingue's Due Diligence and the Evaluation of Teachers is getting a lot of play for asking a simple question: what happens if you try to replicate the L.A. Times "value-added" analysis? Briggs and Domingue found in this case what others have found more generally: value-added figures are disconcertingly fragile if you're hoping to use them to identify particularly strong or weak individual teachers.
The L.A. Times reported on the study this morning, asserting that the replication backed up the original analysis by Richard Buddin. The National Education Policy Center issued a response later in the day pointing out inconsistencies in the Times article (and perhaps suggesting that Times reporter Jason Felch spun the description of the Briggs and Domingue study to make his earlier reporting look good). Mike Rose (quoted above) certainly had the impression that the Times' public response to the replication was self-serving.
I have no idea where this story is headed in the news, but I remain underwhelmed by the Times' editorial choices.