By Maya Trent · Originally reported by Matthew Fleischer (2011) · Wayback archive →
In mid-July 2011 the Associated Press Managing Editors association announced its annual awards, and the LA Times picked up two major honors — the Public Service award for its Bell corruption investigation and a First Amendment honor for the “Grading the Teachers” series.
Then
The Bell investigation — reported by Jeff Gottlieb and Ruben Vives — had documented that the small Los Angeles County city of Bell had been paying its top officials extraordinary salaries, with city manager Robert Rizzo earning roughly $1.5 million annually in a working-class city of 36,000. The investigation produced criminal charges, civic-reform reforms, and a broader reset on how LA-region small-city governance was monitored.
Now
Robert Rizzo was eventually sentenced to twelve years in prison after pleading no contest. Multiple other Bell officials served prison time. Jeff Gottlieb retired from the LA Times; Ruben Vives has continued at the paper through the entire interval, including subsequent investigative work. The “Grading the Teachers” methodology has not aged as well — the broader value-added-modeling approach has been substantially discredited in education-research literature.