Teacher quality is a growing national and state concern in education reform, including teacher evaluation and pay scales. That trend can be traced to and remains reflected in the Los Angeles Times repeated publication of value-added models (VAM) of ranking teacher quality.
Catherine S. Durso’s National Education Policy Center review of VAM results calculated for and reported by the Los Angeles Times exposes that once again linking teacher quality to student test scores fails to identify fairly high-quality teachers. The body of evidence shows that test-based teacher evaluation is unstable and counter-productive to evaluating, paying, and retaining teachers, explains Durso:
“Many researchers have raised concerns regarding the use of value-added models (VAM) for teacher evaluation. Briefly, VAM do not provide guidance for improvement, are
