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Thursday, December 12, 2019

Teachers “Grow” Their Students’ Heights As Much As Their Achievement | VAMboozled!

Teachers “Grow” Their Students’ Heights As Much As Their Achievement | VAMboozled!

Teachers “Grow” Their Students’ Heights As Much As Their Achievement

The title of this post captures the key findings of a study that has come across my desk now over 25 times during the past two weeks; hence, I decided to summarize and share out, also as significant to our collective understandings about value-added models (VAMs).
The study — “Teacher Effects on Student Achievement and Height: A Cautionary Tale” — was recently published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) (Note 1) and authored by Marianne Bitler (Professor of Economics at the University of California, Davis), Sean Corcoran (Associate Professor of Public Policy and Education at Vanderbilt University), Thurston Domina (Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), and Emily Penner (Assistant Professor at the University of California, Irvine).
In short, study researchers used administrative data from New York City Public Schools to estimate the “value” teachers “add” to student achievement, and (also in comparison) to student height. The assumption herein, of course, is that teachers’ cannot plausibly or literally “grow” their students’ heights. If they were found to do so using a VAM (also oft-referred to as “growth” models, hereafter referred to more generally as VAMs), this would threaten the overall validity of the output derive via any such VAM, given VAMs’ sole purposes are to measure teacher effects on “growth” in student achievement and only student achievement over time. Put differently, if a VAM was found to “grow” students’ height, this would ultimately negate the validity of any such VAM given the very purposes for which VAMs have been adopted, implemented, and used, misused, and abused across states, especially over the last decade.
Notwithstanding, study researchers found that “the standard deviation of teacher effects CONTINUE READING: Teachers “Grow” Their Students’ Heights As Much As Their Achievement | VAMboozled!