LA Times Value Added Editorial

The Los Angeles Times editorial page gets it mostly right today on the value-added issue ("Good teachers, good students," September 3, 2010). It says a number of smart things that I agree with, such as:

• "Test scores are indeed just one indicator of a teacher's performance."
• "But it's revealing, and disturbing, to read the comments of some teachers who don't seem to care whether their students' scores slide. They argue that they're focused on more important things than the tests measure. That's unpersuasive."
• "This page has never believed that test scores should count for all of a teacher's evaluation — or even be the most important factor. But they should be a part of it."
• "Right now, the "value-added" scores The Times has been reporting are more useful for evaluating schools than teachers. Many factors can throw off the data at the classroom level."
• "That's why we think the Obama administration has been too hasty to push states into linking test scores to teacher evaluations and to reward states that overemphasize the scores, making them count for half or more of a teacher's worth. The administration's first priorities should have been developing better tests, which it's working on now — if we're going to judge teachers in part by these scores, it's unacceptable to say that top-notch tests are too expensive — and statistical models that minimize random factors and make the scores a better evaluation tool."
• "Current teacher evaluation practices are ripe for overhaul. Performance reviews should include, at minimum, classroom observations, portfolios of student work over the academic year and, yes, objective test data."

I just wish its news division had taken some of these points to heart, namely having patience until the methodology was ready to be joined by other measures of teacher effectiveness, such as classroom observations, and not publishing the value-added scores of individual teachers and definitively labeling some as most effective and least effective.

Heather Horn of The Atlantic magazine offers a nice summary of some of the related issues and links to relevant sources in this September 1, 2010 blog post.

And Dana Goldstein offers a smart retort (and a preview of her upcoming The Nation feature on value added?) to a vacuous and vitriolic Slate post by Jack Shafer on this topic.

Related Posts:

• Education Optimists: "Adding Value to the Value-Added Debate" (August 31, 2010)

• Education Optimists: "More Grist for the Value-Added Mill" (September 1, 2010)

• Education Optimists: All "value added" related posts

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More Grist for the Value-Added Mill

Here is additional smart and pithy commentary on the current value-added conversation that I wasn't able to incorporate into yesterday's post or have only discovered since.

• Dr. Douglas Harris - "Not By Value Added Alone" (The Blog of Harvard Education Publishing)
• Dr. Aaron Pallas - "Value-added measures: The cardinal rule and the cardinal sin" (A Sociological Eye on Education)
  
• Stephen Sawchuk - "Some Scholars Slam Value-Added for Teacher Accountability" (Teacher Beat/Education Week)
• Jay Mathews - "America's Best Teacher and the L.A. Times" (Class Struggle/Washington Post)
• Dr. Daniel Willingham - "3 Key Factors in Teacher Evaluation" (The Answer Sheet/Washington Post)
• Sherman Dorn - "Please leave your magic numbers on the magic carpet with your magic wand" (Sherman Dorn)
• Bill Tucker - "My Value-Added Number" (Quick and the Ed)
• John Thompson - "High-Ranking Teachers Ignore Pacing Standards" (This Week In Education)
• Walt Gardner - "Why Not Name and Shame Teachers?" (Walt Gardner's Reality Check/Education Week)
• Claus von Zastrow - "The LA Times Goes Astray" (Public School Insights/Learning First Alliance)
• Alan Borsuk - "Where newspaper goes in rating teachers, others soon will follow" (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)
• Andy Rotherham - "LA Story" (Eduwonk)

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Using Value Added to Assess Teacher Effectiveness

The Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management -- an organization not widely known outside of academia and technical policy circles -- puts on truly meaty conferences. I've attended three APPAM conferences to date, including the Annual Fall Research Conference going on in Washington, DC this week.

Education is merely one strand at APPAM, but the sessions feature some of the biggest names in educational research addressing some very policy relevant issues. The current conference features sessions on value-added modeling, school choice, teacher certification and teacher induction, teacher performance pay, financial aid, college persistence, and more.

The session I attended yesterday on "Using Value Added To Assess Teacher Effectiveness" was excellent. It featured four papers each of which I will undoubtedly oversimplify in this brief blog post. (I encourage you to seek out the papers and read them closely -- below I've linked to those that are available.) One by Dan Goldhaber and Michael Hansen (University of Washington) suggests that year-to-year correlations in value-added teacher effects are modest, but that pre-tenure estimates of teacher job performance do predict estimated post-tenure performance in both math and reading. A second by Julian Betts (UCSD) and Cory Koedel (University of Missouri-Columbia) suggests that bias does exist in value-added models due to student sorting, but that it can be overcome through the use of multiple years of value-added data; further, the study suggests that data from the first year or two of classroom teaching may be insufficient to make reliable judgments about teacher quality. A third by Michael Weiss of MDRC suggests that that teacher variability carries implications for measuring program effects within randomized controlled trials when those teachers are not randomly assigned. And a fourth by John Tyler (Brown University) and Tom Kane (Harvard University) found that teacher assessments made using classroom observation rubrics (such as Charlotte Danielson's) are closely aligned with value-added ratings of teachers.

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