U.S. Department of Education: Value-Added Not Good for Evaluating Schools and Principals
Just this month, the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) wing of the U.S. Department of Education released a report about using value-added models (VAMs) for measuring school principals’ performance. The article conducted by researchers at Mathematica Policy Research and titled “Can Student Test Scores Provide Useful Measures of School Principals’ Performance?” can be found online here, with my summary of the study findings highlighted next and herein.
Before the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), 40 states had written into their state statutes, as incentivized by the federal government, to use growth in student achievement growth for annual principal evaluation purposes. More states had written growth/value-added models (VAMs) for teacher evaluation purposes, which we have covered extensively via this blog, but this pertains only to school and/or principal evaluation purposes. Now since the passage of ESSA, and the reduction in the federal government’s control over state-level policies, states now have much more liberty to more freely decide whether to continue using student achievement growth for either purposes. This paper is positioned within this reasoning, and more specifically to help states decide whether or to what extent they might (or might not) continue to move forward with using growth/VAMs for school and principal evaluation purposes.
Researchers, more specifically, assessed (1) reliability – or the consistency or stability of these ratings over time, which is important “because only stable parts of a rating have the potential to contain information about principals’ future performance; unstable parts reflect only transient aspects of their performance;” and (2) one form of multiple evidences of validity – the predictive validity of these principal-level measures, with predictive validitydefined as “the extent to which ratings from these measures accurately reflect principals’ contributions to student achievement in future years.” In short, “A measure could have high predictive validity only if [emphasis added] it was highly stable between consecutive U.S. Department of Education: Value-Added Not Good for Evaluating Schools and Principals | VAMboozled!: