Doug Harris on the “Every Student Succeeds Act” and Reasons to Continue with VAMs Regardless
Two weeks ago I wrote a post about the passage of the “Every Student Succeeds Act” (ESSA), and its primary purpose to reduce “the federal footprint and restore local control, while empowering parents and education leaders to hold schools accountable for effectively teaching students” within their states. More specific to VAMs, I wrote about how ESSA will allow states to decide how to weight their standardized test scores and decide whether and how to evaluate teachers with or without said scores.
Doug Harris, an Associate Professor of Economics at Tulane in Louisiana and, as I’ve written prior, “a ‘cautious’ but quite active proponent of VAMs” (see another two posts about Harris here and here) recently took to an Education Week blog to respond to ESSA, as well. His post titled, “NCLB 3.0 Could Improve the Use of Value-Added and Other Measures” can be read with a subscription. For those of you without a subscription, however, I’ve highlighted some of his key arguments below, along with my responses to those I felt were most pertinent here.
In his post, Harris argues that one element of ESSA “clearly reinforces value-added–the continuation of annual testing.” He equates these (i.e., value-added and testing) as synonyms, with which I would certainly disagree. The latter precedes the former, and without the latter the former would not exist. In other words, it’s what one does with the test scores, whereby test scores do not just mean by default the same thing as VAMs.
In addition, while the continuation of annual testing is written into ESSA, the use of VAMs is not, and their use for teacher evaluations, or not, is now left to all state’s to decide. Hence, it is true that ESSA “means the states will no longer have to abide by Doug Harris on the “Every Student Succeeds Act” and Reasons to Continue with VAMs Regardless | VAMboozled!:
