October 21, 2010 | A Statement on Education
We invite you to add your name to the below statement, initiated by ten prominent education scholars, that urges policymakers to not pursue heavy reliance on test scores for evaluating, rewarding and removing teachers. Links to relevant research on this issue are listed below. Please sign up and tell your friends and colleagues to do so as well. Thank you for your interest.
Lawrence Mishel | President, Economic Policy Institute
Heavy reliance on test scores for teacher evaluation is misguided.
Too many policymakers have recently adopted the misguided belief that improvements in students' scores on standardized tests in mathematics and reading can be heavily relied upon to evaluate, reward, and remove the teachers of these tested students.
However, even the most sophisticated use of test scores, value added modeling (VAM), is a flawed and inaccurate way to judge whether teachers are effective or ineffective.
The heavy use of VAM in a teacher evaluation system will misidentify large numbers of both effective and ineffective teachers. Leading authorities (such as the Board on Testing and Assessment of the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Education, and researchers from RAND and the Educational Testing Service and a recent Economic Policy Institute paper by a group of prominent scholars, Problems With the Use of Student Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers) concur that VAM is too inaccurate to be used as the primary way to evaluate teachers. Most uses of test scores in teacher evaluation, in practice, actually fall far short of the
