Comparing Oak Trees’ “Apples to Apples,” by Stanford’s Edward Haertel
A VAMboozled! follower posted this comment via Facebook the other day: “I was wondering if you had seen this video by The Value-Added Research Center [VARC], called the “Oak Tree Analogy” [it is the second video down]? My children’s school district has it on their web-site. What are your thoughts about VARC, and the video?”
I have my own thoughts about VARC, and I will share these next, but better than that I have somebody else’s much wiser thoughts about this video, as this video has in many ways gone “viral.”
Professor Edward Haertel, School of Education at Stanford University, wrote Linda Darling-Hammond (Stanford), Jesse Rothstein (Berkeley), and me an email a few years ago about just this video. While I could not find the email he eloquently drafted then, I persuaded (aka, begged) him to recreate what he wrote then, here, for all of you.
You might want to watch the video, first, to follow along, or least, to more critically view the contents of the video. You decide, but Professor Haertel writes:
“The Value-Added Research Center’s ‘Oak Tree’ analogy is helpful in conveying the theory [emphasis added] behind value-added models. To compare the two gardeners, we adjust away various influences that are out of the gardeners’ control, and then, as with value added, we just assume that whatever is left over must have been due to the