{"id":2643,"date":"2010-10-27T16:00:59","date_gmt":"2010-10-27T20:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=2643"},"modified":"2010-10-31T08:21:27","modified_gmt":"2010-10-31T12:21:27","slug":"erik-hanushek-meet-the-tort-of-false-light","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=2643","title":{"rendered":"Erik Hanushek, meet the tort of &#8220;false light&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the <em>New York Daily News<\/em> today, Stanford education professor Erik Hanushek argues that&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nydailynews.com\/opinions\/2010\/10\/27\/2010-10-27_uft_wrong_to_fight_joel_kleins_attempt_to_release_teacher_data.html\">UFT [is] wrong to fight Joel Klein&#39;s attempt to release teacher data<\/a>. Hanushek makes three arguments here:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Value-added methods are valuable even if imperfect<\/li>\n<li>The public has a right to know about teacher effectiveness<\/li>\n<li>Erik Hanushek personally does not want test score data to be the sole method of evaluating teachers (so you can trust his motives)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Problems with the op-ed, at least on first reading:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><em>Feel-good\/macho union-bashing<\/em>. Hanushek writes, &quot;Unfortunately, many in the schools, led by the teachers unions, are not particularly interested in entering a discussion of which teachers are performing poorly.&quot; Let&#39;s see: in the context of New York City, where there was an explicit agreement to begin to use test scores to help teachers in instruction, and where the union is out in advance of a number of its members&#8230;. Yeah, go ahead and slam one of the locals that&#39;s moved at all on test scores. That may feel good or be good &quot;politics,&quot; but I think it&#39;s foolish.<\/li>\n<li><em>Internal inconsistency<\/em>. Hanushek&#39;s statement that test score data shouldn&#39;t be the only instrument to evaluate teachers flies in the face of releasing <em>only<\/em> the mediocre value-added measures that have been requested, when anyone knows that the New York tabloids will slap the &quot;this is an effectiveness measure&quot; label on them. &nbsp;&nbsp;<\/li>\n<li><em>&quot;The problem is so bad, it&#39;s okay if we paint teachers in a false light.&quot;<\/em> Hanushek&#39;s argument essentially boils down to, &quot;Yeah, the data&#39;s unreliable. It&#39;s better than nothing, so we should publish it.&quot; That&#39;s pretty close to reckless disregard of the truth, when you know that of the thousands of teachers whose mediocre value-added measures would be published, hundreds and hundreds would be portrayed as far less effective than they are in reality. (This is simply playing the odds.) I don&#39;t know if New York state has a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rcfp.org\/handbook\/c02p04.html\">tort of false light<\/a>, but you have all the elements here: publication of data that the publisher knows is false (even if the publisher doesn&#39;t know which teachers the data is blatantly wrong on), and where the data is designed to shame both the schools and the individual teachers.&nbsp;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Most of the privacy-related discussion on the <em>L.A. Times<\/em> publication of a teacher database focused on issues that are probably not actionable in court, because the newspaper could defend teacher effectiveness (however framed) as newsworthy. &quot;False light&quot; is a different story. Note: my understanding is that torts based on violations of privacy are only a little over a century old, and they&#39;re fairly dependent on state-specific case law, especially false-light lawsuits. But I think the notion of &quot;false light&quot; is the right one here.&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the New York Daily News today, Stanford education professor Erik Hanushek argues that&nbsp;UFT [is] wrong to fight Joel Klein&#39;s attempt to release teacher data. Hanushek makes three arguments here: Value-added methods are valuable even if imperfect The public has a right to know about teacher effectiveness Erik Hanushek personally does not want test score [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[16,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-accountability-frankenstein","category-education-policy"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-GD","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2643"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2643\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2652,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2643\/revisions\/2652"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}