Special Issue of “Educational Researcher” (Paper #9 of 9): Amidst the “Blooming Buzzing Confusion”
Recall that the peer-reviewed journal Educational Researcher (ER) – published a “Special Issue” including nine articles examining value-added measures (VAMs). I have reviewed the last of nine articles (#9 of 9), which is actually a commentary titled “Value Added: A Case Study in the Mismatch Between Education Research and Policy.” This commentary is authored by Stephen Raudenbush – Professor of Sociology and Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago.
Like with the last two commentaries reviewed here and here, Raudenbush writes of the “Special Issue” that, in this topical area, “[r]esearchers want their work to be used, so we flirt with the idea that value-added research tells us how to improve schooling…[Luckily, perhaps] this volume has some potential to subdue this flirtation” (p. 138).
Raudenbush positions the research covered in this “Special Issue,” as well as the research on teacher evaluation and education in general, as being conducted amidst the “blooming buzzing confusion” (p. 138) surrounding the messy world through which we negotiate life. This is why “specific studies don’t tell us what to do, even if they sometimes have large potential for informing expert judgment” (p. 138).
With that being said, “[t]he hard question is how to integrate the new research on teachers with other important strands of research [e.g., effective schools research] in order to inform rather than distort practical judgment” (p. 138). Echoing Susan Moore Johnson’s sentiments, reviewed as article #6 here, this is appropriately hard if we are to augment versus undermine “our capacity to mobilize the “social capital” of the school to strengthen the human capital of the teacher” (p. 138).
On this note, and “[i]n sum, recent research on value added tells us that, by using data from student perceptions, classroom observations, and test score growth, we can obtain credible evidence [albeit weakly related evidence, referring to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s MET studies] of the relative effectiveness of a set of teachers who teach Special Issue of “Educational Researcher” (Paper #9 of 9): Amidst the “Blooming Buzzing Confusion” | VAMboozled!: