VAMs at the Value-Added Research Center (VARC)
Following up from our last post including Professor Haertel’s analysis of the “Oak Tree” video, produced and disseminated by the Value-Added Research Center (VARC) affiliated with the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I thought I would follow-up, as also requested by the same VAMboozled! reader, a bit more about VARC and what I know about this organization and their VAM.
Dr. Robert H. Meyer founded VARC in 2004 and currently serves as VARC’s Research Director. Accordingly, VARC’s value-added model is also known as Meyer’s model, just as the EVAAS® is also known as Sanders’s model.
Like with the EVAAS®, VARC has a mission to perform ground-breaking work on value-added systems, as well as to conduct value-added research to evaluate the effectiveness of teachers (and schools/districts) and educational programs and policies. Unlike with the EVAAS®, however, VARC describes its methods as transparent. Although, there is actually more information about the inner workings of the EVAAS® model on the SAS website and via other publications than there is about the VARC model and its methods, this is likely due to the relative youth of the VARC model, as VARC is currently at year three in terms of model development and implementation (VARC, 2012c).
Nonetheless, VARC has a “research-based philosophy,” and VARC officials have stated