“The Worst Popular Idea Out There”
On the blog titled the “Big Education Ape,” David B. Cohen recently wrote a nice summary re: the current thinking about VAMs, with a heck-of-a way of capturing them, that also serves as the title of this post: “The Worst Popular Idea Out There.” That statement alone inspired me to post, below, the contents of his piece. Hopefully, his post will resonate and sound familiar, but to those who are new to VAMs and/or this blog, this is nice, short summary of, again, the current thinking about VAMs.
David writes “about [this] evaluation method [as it] stands out as the worst popular idea out there – using value-added measurement (VAM) of student test scores as part of a teacher evaluation. The research evidence showing problems with VAM in teacher evaluation is solid, consistent, and comes from multiple fields and disciplines…The evidence comes from companies, universities, and governmental studies…the anecdotal evidence is rather damning as well: how many VAM train-wrecks do we need to see?…[Teachers all agree] that an effective teacher needs to be able to “The Worst Popular Idea Out There” |: