This article reviews the impact of further education (FE) colleges -- in particular, mixed economy colleges -- on the surrounding environment and community, and attempts to answer the question of whether the mixed economy college can still be considered an anchor in the community. A mixed methods small-scale case study of a medium-sized mixed…

In his 1837 essay "The American Scholar," Ralph Waldo Emerson offers a challenge that is appropriate for honors practitioners today--namely, to figure out just how good a time this is to be doing the work we do. Honors students, faculty, and staff occupy every part of the institutions we call home, so we should take advantage of our…

California is one of just two states (with Kansas) that does not use a student-level growth model to measure school performance. This brief lays out a number of common beliefs about growth models and provides evidence that these beliefs are inaccurate or unsupported. In so doing, the brief makes a positive case that the state should adopt such a…

This paper proposes a new methodology for estimating teacher value-added. Rather than imposing a normality assumption on unobserved teacher quality (as in the standard empirical Bayes approach), our nonparametric estimator permits the underlying distribution to be estimated directly and in a computationally feasible way. The resulting estimates…

This study investigates how uncertainty works in science policy debates by considering an unusual case: one in which uncertainty-based arguments for delay come from the scientific community, rather than industry actors. The case I present is the central use of value-added modeling (VAM) in the evaluation of individual teachers, a controversial…

Inappropriate treatment of missing data may introduce bias into the value-added estimation. We consider a commonly used value-added model (VAM), which includes the past student test score as a covariate. We formulate a joint model of student achievement and missing data, in which the probability of observing a test score depends on observing the…

The goal of this article is to clarify and unravel the complexity and challenges of improving teaching quality, based on measuring teaching quality and feeding back the results to teachers. We analyze different conceptualizations of teaching quality, and synthesize a framework for conceptualizing teaching quality in educational practice. We…

Until recently, legal challenges to the use of value-added models (VAMs) in evaluation and teacher employment decisions in federal court had been unsuccessful. However, in May 2017 a federal court in Texas ruled that plaintiff-teachers established a viable federal constitutional claim to challenge the use of VAMs as a means for their termination…

In this essay I review the advantages and challenges of contingent faculty service from a perspective which crosses programs, but chiefly from within one academic institution, a church-related but independent theological seminary. I anecdotally relate certain "value-added" potentialities which accrue for students and instruction when an…

Research and Development (R&D) project managers in Higher Education must deal with uncertainty, ambiguity, competition, accountability and different objectives for professors, scientists, firms, users and other stakeholders. Formal project management frameworks are commonly adapted to support this. However, the wide range of challenges related…

This report answers questions about teacher and administrator perceptions of Professional Pathways for Teachers (PPfT) program implementation. PPfT is a multi-measure appraisal and compensation system designed to empower teachers and improve the quality of teaching in Austin Independent School District. PPfT is in its third year, and stakeholders…

Panel or grouped data are often used to allow for unobserved individual heterogeneity in econometric models via fixed effects. In this paper, we discuss identification of a panel data model in which the unobserved heterogeneity both enters additively and interacts with treatment variables. We present identification and estimation methods for…

After emphasizing biomedical and clinical sciences for over a century, US medical schools are expanding experiential roles that allow students to learn about health care delivery while also adding value to patient care. After developing a program where all 1st-year medical students are integrated into interprofessional care teams to contribute to…

As teacher quality is judged and tenured teachers are rated ineffective, educators are challenging teacher evaluation systems in the courts as they adversely affect their employment. Teachers have lost jobs, pay, tenure, and career advancement. This article reports on these cases, providing an interpretation in light of court cases about teacher…

According to the 2013 report by the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), most teacher education programs are failing in the United States. These programs, NCTQ insists, are not preparing new teachers with sufficiently 'scientific' methods and are, in the process, failing to properly train prospective teachers how to 'lead the classroom' (p.…