Value-Added Evaluation & Those Pesky Collateralized Debt Obligations
by Frederick M. Hess • May 3, 2011 at 8:01 am
Cross-posted from Education Week
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ShareLast week, while I was away, Brookings released another of its occasional "consensus" documents; this one's titled, "Passing Muster: Evaluating Teacher Evaluation Systems." The effort was once again led by Brookings' savvy Russ Whitehurst. The aim, more or less, is to tell state and federal officials how to "achieve a uniform standard for dispensing funds to school districts for the recognition of exceptional teachers without imposing a uniform evaluation system."
The report offers an impressive seven-step model to help policymakers figure out how many teachers will be misidentified by different evaluation strategies under different sets of assumptions. "Misidentification" is meant conceptually, but, practically speaking, is discussed in terms of how the teachers in question fare on value-added calculations. The report also features new jargon like "tolerance" and "exceptionality" to characterize "how willing policymakers are to risk an error of over-inclusion" or "the cutoff in a teacher rank distribution that is used for decision-making." The paper is clever, and fine as far as it goes, but leaves me concerned about the direction of teacher evaluation policy.
The exercise aims to inform efforts to evaluate teachers for whom districts can't do value-added analysis, but the underlying thread seems to be the casual, implicit assumption that reading and math value-added are the "true" measure of teacher quality. This is hardly a unique take; it's become the norm. The same stance