Gates' 'value-added' study is full of holes
A study released last month by the Gates Foundation supposedly offered up “some of the strongest evidence to date of the validity of ‘value-added’ analysis.” VAA makes the claim that teachers' effectiveness can be reliably estimated by gauging their students' progress on standardized tests. But Jesse Rothstein,an economist at UC Berkeley, argues that the analyses in the report do not support its conclusions.
Rothstein reviewed the Gates study for the Think Twice think tank review project. His review is published by the National Education Policy Center, housed at the University of Colorado . Rothstein, who in 2009-10 served as