A Leap of Faith: The Incoherence of Using Value-Added Estimates as a Proxy for Effective Teaching
Jimmy Scherrer – Assistant Professor at North Carolina State University and former teacher and mathematics instructional coach in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) – is a rising star in the education academy, in large part due to his educational research on VAMs as well as mathematics, educational policy, and the like. I’ve cited one of the pieces he wrote in 2011 (for a educational practitioner audience) many times as the way he carefully deconstructed some of the assumptions surrounding VAMs and VAM uses within this piece speaks volumes to much of the absurdity surrounding them. See the full PDF of this article here. See also the full reference for this piece: “Measuring Teaching Using Value-Added Modeling: The Imperfect Panacea,” here, in my list of the “Top 25 Research Articles” about VAMs.
Well, Schererrer just published a new article titled, “The Limited Utility of Value-Added Modeling in Education Research and Policy,” and I invited him to write a blog post about this piece for you all here. Scherrer graciously agreed, and wrote the following:
As someone who works with students in poverty [see also a recent article Scherrer wrote in the highly esteemed, peer-reviewed Educational Researcher here], I am deeply troubled by the use of status measures—the raw scores of standardized assessments—for accountability purposes. The relationship between SES and standardized assessment scores is well known. Thus, using status measures for accountability purposes incentivizes teachers to work in the most advantaged schools.
So, I am pleased with the increasing number of accountability systems that are moving away from status measures. In their place, systems seem to be favoring value-added A Leap of Faith: The Incoherence of Using Value-Added Estimates as a Proxy for Effective Teaching |: