Frederick M. Hess's Blog
The Value of Value-Added
by Frederick M. Hess • Apr 21, 2010 at 9:52 am
Cross-posted from Education Week
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I've been meaning to do a longer postmortem on Florida's Senate Bill 6. As I've noted before, I enthusiastically supported it even though I thought it a deeply flawed bill. The flaw? Its ham-fisted attempt to strip out one set of anachronistic strictures (governing tenure and step-and-lane pay scales) only to replace it with a set of test-driven processes that were almost equally troubling.
I'll get to that eventually. But in travels to Boston and Houston yesterday, I had occasion to reflect on the often incautious faith in value-added assessment that underlies many efforts to rethink teacher evaluation and pay. The simple truth: value-added is an imperfect, imprecise, and fundamentally limited way to gauge teacher efficacy. That said, it's still a helluva lot better than the status quo. If we're honest and up-front about its limits and use it as tool that should be handled with care, I'm an advocate. The trick is to be openly and proactively critical about tools like value-added (or merit pay or school choice) so that we can design them thoughtfully and anticipate problems.
Unfortunately, too often--as in Senate Bill 6 or in proposals that districts should start to publicize the value-
