History of IDEA
Jeannie Oakes, Founder and Former Director
Youth Voice in School Finance
NEW REPORT: Los Angeles' road to A-G for all
Without Dollars and Sense Powerpoint
Past Educational Opportunity Reports
3 very weak arguments for using weak indicators
- 11-19-2010
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Blog by Bruce D. Baker/School Finance 101
This post is partly in response to the Brookings Institution report released this week which urged that value-added measures be considered in teacher evaluation: However, this post is more targeted at the punditry that has followed the Brookings report – the punditry that now latches onto this report as a significant endorsement of using value-added ratings as a major component in high-stakes personnel decisions. Personally, I didn’t read it that way. Nowhere did I see this report arguing strongly for a substantial emphasis on value-added measures. That said, I actually felt that the report based its rather modest conclusions on 3 deeply flawed arguments. Argument 1 – Other methods of teacher evaluation are ineffective at determining good versus bad teachers because those methods are only weakly correlated with value-added measures. Or, in other words, current value added measures, while only weak predictors of future value-added, are still stronger predictors of future value-added (using the same measures and models) than other indirect measures of teacher quality such as experience or principal evaluations. (more…)
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