New NYC Chancellor, Same Old, Controversial Value-Added Policy
With the Bloomberg administration in court today arguing for the right to release to the media the value-added ratings of 12,000 New York City public school teachers, it's a good time to remember that a number proponents of value-added research itself actually oppose this sort of hyper-public rating, ranking, and shaming of teachers.
When I profiled Teach for America founder Wendy Kopp for The Daily Beast, here's what she told me about newspapers publishing value-added data linked to individual teachers' names:
The principals of very high performing schools would all say their No. 1 strategy is to build extraordinary teams. I can't imagine it's a good organizational strategy to go publish the names of teachers and one data point about whether they are effective or not in the newspaper.
Douglas Harris, a University of Wisconsin economist and a leading practioner of value-added research, says that