Using VAMs “In Not Very Intelligent Ways:” A Q&A with Jesse Rothstein
The American Prospect — a self-described “liberal intelligence” magazine — featured last week a question and answer, interview-based article with Jesse Rothstein — Professor of Economics at University of California – Berkeley — on “The Economic Consequences of Denying Teachers Tenure.” Rothstein is a great choice for this one in that indeed he is an economist, but one of a few, really, who is deep into the research literature and who, accordingly, has a balanced set of research-based beliefs about value-added models (VAMs), their current uses in America’s public schools, and what they can and cannot do (theoretically) to support school reform. He’s probably most famous for a study he conducted in 2009 about how the non-random, purposeful sorting of students into classrooms indeed biases (or distorts) value-added estimations, pretty much despite the sophistication of the statistical controls meant to block (or control for) such bias (or distorting effects). You can find this study referenced here, and a follow-up to this studyhere.
In this article, though, the interviewer — Rachel Cohen — interviews Jesse primarily about how in California a higher court recently reversed the Vergara v. California decision that would have weakened teacher employment protections throughout the state (see alsohere). “In 2014, in Vergara v. California, a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge ruled that a variety of teacher job protections worked together to violate students’ constitutional Using VAMs “In Not Very Intelligent Ways:” A Q&A with Jesse Rothstein | VAMboozled!: