Scholar critical of value added method speaking to LA teachers
9:13 a.m. | By Adolfo Guzman-Lopez
State education officials are worried about the hundreds of photos of standardized tests – sometimes with answers – that have begun to appear on social networking sites. A talk on whether to factor student test scores into teachers’ performance evaluations is taking place on Monday afternoon.
L.A. Unified’s teachers union is sponsoring a talk Monday evening about one of public education’s most hotly debated issues: whether to factor student test scores into teachers’ performance evaluations.
Stanford University professor Linda Darling Hammond says her talk will focus on the student performance measure commonly known as Value Added Modeling.
The federal government has encouraged states to use those methods as part of the teacher evaluation process but researchers have found a lot of problems with this methodology.
She says the complicated method generates wild variations in results and relies too much on standardized tests that don’t favor black and Latino working-class students. She says there are other ways to determine