To those who mindlessly quote the great Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis line that “sunlight is … the best of disinfectants” I reply, if you go outside without sunscreen on you’ll get sunburned. Stay out and you’ll die.
Information without context is not knowledge. Sadly, context doesn’t sell newspapers, or drive web traffic or build television and radio audiences. As a consequence, the traditional media doesn’t do so well as we like to think in that regard.
With that as introduction, and context, my topic here is the fracas in Los Angeles between the LATimes and the American Federation of Teachers. The Times has decided “to publish data showing how individual teachers may have influenced the standardized test scores of students.” In case you missed it, that means publish names of individual teachers.
Teachers union president Randi Weingarten objects:
Teachers “look at this as a hammer, a sledgehammer, and they’re scared about it,” she said. “They’re schoolteachers; they’re private individuals…. They’re not public figures. And they just woke up one day and 6,000 names were going to be in the newspaper.”
The Times analyzed seven years of math and English scores from Los Angeles Unified School District elementary schools, and determined how the individual teachers may have affected the scores of their students. The analysis looked at how much a student improved — or regressed — in the course of a year in a given teacher’s class.
The LATimes justifies publication with what his become little more than journalistic boilerplate:
The Times has decided to make the ratings available because they bear on the performance of public employees who provide an important service, and in the belief that parents and the public have a right to the information.
Even setting aside all of the problems with and efficacy of standardized testing, publishing those names does nothing to address the very real problems of our public schools, of evaluating teacher performance or of improving learning outcomes. What it does do is provide fodder to whip up the public, demonize and scapegoat innocent individual teachers and further undermine public education in America.
Larry Lessig, in a widely quoted but less widely understood piece in The New Republic last year, provocatively titled Against Transparency, coined the term naked transparency:
How could anyone be against transparency? Its virtues and its utilities seem so crushingly obvious. But I have increasingly come to worry that there is an error at the core of this unquestioned goodness. We are not thinking critically enough about where and when transparency works, and where and when it may lead to confusion, or to worse. And I fear that the inevitable success of this movement–if pursued alone, without any sensitivity to the full complexity of the idea of perfect openness–will inspire not reform, but disgust. The “naked transparency movement,” as I will call it here, is not going to inspire change. It will simply push any faith in our political [or, in this case, our public education] system over the cliff.
The naked transparency movement marries the power of network technology to the radical decline in the cost of collecting, storing, and distributing data. Its aim is to liberate that data, especially government data, so as to enable the public to process it and understand it better, or at least differently.
Lessig believes in transparency. He says the vast majority of transparency projects make sense. What he is trying to do is articulate the difference between a transparency that results in a public good and transparency that is a demonizing distraction and, thus, comes at a great public cost.
The area Lessig points to as problematic is a transparency intended to reveal potentially improper influence, or outright corruption:
These projects assume that they are seeking an obvious good. No doubt they will have a profound effect. But will the effect of these projects–at least on their own, unqualified or unrestrained by other considerations–really be for the good? Do we really want the world that they righteously envisage?
I’m placing those Los Angeles public school teachers’ names in this category. Their perceived influence is the presumed bad influence of a bad teacher; their perceived corruption is that they take a public paycheck for doing that bad job. This transparency will inevitably lead many to conclude, based on this information and this information alone, that those poorly performing teachers — as defined by the data — should be fired.
Naked Transparency is targeted transparency:
Brandeis described what has become a school of regulatory theory–what Archon Fung, Mary Graham, and David Weil describe in Full Disclosure: The Perils and Promise of Transparency as "targeted transparency." As they define it, targeted transparency "represents a distinctive category of public policies that, at their most basic level, mandate disclosure … of standardized, comparable, and disaggregated information regarding specific products or practices to a broad audience in order to achieve a public policy purpose." […]
The problem, however, is that not all data satisfies the simple requirement that they be information that consumers can use, presented in a way they can use it. "More information," as Fung and his colleagues put it, "does not always produce markets that are more efficient." Instead, "responses to information are inseparable from their interests, desires, resources, cognitive capacities, and social contexts. Owing to these and other factors, people may ignore information, or misunderstand it, or misuse it. Whether and how new information is used to further public objectives depends upon its incorporation into complex chains of comprehension, action, and response."
To know whether a particular transparency rule works, then, we need to trace just how the information will enter these "complex chains of comprehension." We need to see what comparisons the data will enable, and whether those comparisons reveal something real. And it is this that the naked transparency movement has not done. For there are overwhelming reasons why the data about influence that this movement would produce will not enable comparisons that are meaningful. This is not to say the data will not have an effect. It will. But the effect, I fear, is not one that anybody in the "naked transparency movement," or any other thoughtful citizen, would want.
Read Lessig’s full piece. No excerpt here can do it justice. The publication of those names serves political and journalistic ends, but in this case those ends are not synonymous with any public good.
In District TMV, when you’re telling me how wrong I am, please also point me to where on the web I can go to read your most recent job performance evaluation.