The Wallstreet Journal also Captures the ASA’s Recent Position Statement on VAMs
Yesterday I released the second of two posts about the recent release of the American Statistical Association’s Position Statement about using VAMs for educational assessment and accountability. Below is a third post, as again warranted, given the considerable significance of this statement.
This one comes from The Washington Post – The Answer Sheet by Valerie Strauss and is pasted here, almost in full.
Strauss writes: “You can be certain that members of the American Statistical Association, the largest organization in the United States representing statisticians and related professionals, know a thing or two about data and measurement. That makes the statement that the association just issued very important for school reform.
The ASA just slammed the high-stakes “value-added method” (VAM) of evaluating teachers that has been increasingly embraced in states as part of school-reform efforts. VAM purports to be able to take student standardized test scores and measure the “value” a teacher adds to student learning through complicated formulas that can supposedly factor out all of the other influences and emerge with a valid assessment of how effective a particular teacher has been.
These formulas can’t actually do this with sufficient reliability and validity, but school reformers have pushed this approach and now most states use VAM as part of teacher evaluations. Because math and English test scores are available, reformers have devised bizarre implementation methods in which teachers are assessed on the test scores of The Wallstreet Journal also Captures the ASA’s Recent Position Statement on VAMs |: