Education. The 'Value-Added' Debate...

[YvonneCa]

...here:

http://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2010/09/15/value-added-and-favoritism/


Excerpt...

"The reality is that value-added measures simply create new opportunities to manipulate teacher evaluations through favoritism. In fact, it might even be easier to get a teacher fired by making sure the teacher has a weak value-added scorecard. Because value-added estimates are sensitive to non-random assignment of students, principals can easily manipulate the distributions of disruptive students, students with special needs, students with weak prior growth and other factors, which, if not fully accounted for by the VA model will bias teacher ratings. And some factors – like disruptive students, or those who simply don’t give a $#*! won’t (and can’t) be addressed in the VA models. That is, a clever principal can use the VA non-random assignment bias to create a statistical illusion that a teacher is a bad teacher."




Cross-posted in GD.

[LuckyLib]

1. This is exactly what Americans need to understand. Only when student progress is measured

individually, when goals are set for each student and everyone is on board, can we look at what has happened in a school year and assess everyone's effort to that end: student, parents, teacher, school.

[YvonneCa]

2. Exactly. Thanks for your post. n/t