Value-added and the non-random sorting of kids who don’t give a sh^%t
Last week, this video from The Onion (asking whether tests are biased against kids who don’t give a sh^%t) was going viral among the education social networking geeks like me. At the same time, the conversations continued on the Los Angeles Times Value-Added story, with LAT releasing the scores for individual teachers.
I’ve written many blog posts in recent weeks on this topic. Lately, it seems that the emphasis on the conversation has turned toward finding a middle ground – discussing the appropriate role for VAM (Value Added Modeling) – if any, in teacher evaluation. But also, there is renewed rhetoric defending VAM. Most of that rhetoric seems to take on most directly the concern over the error rates in VAM – and lack of strong year to year correlation between which teachers are rated high or low.
The new rhetoric points out that we’re only having this conversation about VAM error rates because we can
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In a controversial new series of articles, the Los Angeles Times has begun evaluating Los Angeles Unified School District teachers using a new grading system. This so-called “value-added” analysis attempts to explain student test scores by comparing the student with him or herself as opposed to the presently used Academic Progress Index (API) which compares students to their peers. The Times and proponents of this system claim that it mitigates many of the socio-economic discrepancies that have dogged the accuracy of standardized testing since its genesis. Value-added analysis 