AERA Concludes the Facts Are Factual about VAM
The American Education Research Association (AERA) can be counted on to remain irrelevant to research discussions of great social significance. Not surprisingly, AERA's shrinking membership numbers havecoincided with the org's steady drift into the arms of education reform schoolers and the corrupt CorpEd foundations that are laser focused on redirecting education at all levels into corporate revenue streams.
AERA's complacency and complicity have been sickening to watch, with their kowtowing to Bill Gates and his various bad ideas culminating last year when AERA announced a fellowship program for doctoral students interested channeling and then relinquishing their doctoral research to the Gates's MET database.
Now almost 20 years after legitimate researchers starting ringing the alarm bell on the value-added muddle that was thrust upon the education world by the tobacco-chewing ag statistitian, Bill Sanders, and six years after the National Academy of Sciences sent their hair-on-fire letter to Arne Duncan (which was ignored), warning him about including not-ready-for-prime-time VAM in Race to the Top requirements , AERA has finally concluded that the truth must be true: VAM is not a legitimate tool for ANY high stakes education decisions.
From AERA's announcement:
. . . . In recent years, many states and districts have attempted to use VAM to determine the contributions of educators, or the programs in which they were trained, to student learning outcomes, as captured by standardized student tests. The AERA statement speaks to the formidable statistical and methodological issues involved in isolating either the effects of educators or teacher preparation programs from a complex set of factors that shape student performance.
“This statement draws on the leading testing, statistical, and methodological expertise in the field of education research and related sciences, and on the highest standards that guide education research and its applications in policy and practice,” said AERA Executive Director Felice J. Levine.
The statement addresses the challenges facing the validity of inferences from VAM, as well as specifies eight Schools Matter: AERA Concludes the Facts Are Factual about VAM: