On Monday, the Pennsylvania Department of Education denied a request by the Philadelphia Inquirer to make public the number of middle school teachers who failed subject matter tests on a district-by- district level. While the Department has said that more than a quarter of the nearly 3,000 teachers who have thus far taken the test failed, the Department claims it hasn't broken the results down by district and has no intention of doing so, apparently because in the words of Governor Rendel, "It would be unfair to subject them to such ridicule." As we reported in the last TQB, Philadelphia has so far been the only district in Pennsylvania to request data on its teachers' performance, and it courageously made the results public -- even though a whopping half of Philly teachers who took the test failed.

Anne Gordon, managing editor of the Inquirer, expressed her dismay with the Department's decision, saying, "If there is a problem with teacher qualifications, the public should be made more aware of it. The best way to deal with an issue is to first confront it in public discussion and debate." Meanwhile Vicki Phillips, Pennsylvania's Education Secretary, claimed the decision not to release the data was motivated in part by concerns that releasing the data might be a breach of teachers' right to confidentiality, especially in small districts where identifying which teachers scored poorly would be less difficult than in a large district like Philadelphia.

The US Department of Education, tromped upon by NCLB critics, has been strangely silent about the Pennsylvania results, given that they provide indisputable evidence of the importance of NCLB's teacher quality provisions. Clearly it is only because of NCLB requirements that we are even learning about the sad state of affairs. The Department would do well to trumpet that fact. Other states are unlikely to behave any differently than Pennsylvania officials, kicking and screaming the whole way. It's going to take both an outraged public and unrelenting federal muscle to begin rectifying a national disgrace.