Value-added estimates of teacher or school quality are increasingly used for both high- and low-stakes accountability purposes, making understanding of their limitations critical. A review of the recent value-added literature suggests three concerns with the state of the research. First, the issues receiving the most research attention have not…

In this article, several ways to adjust gross school effects are discussed to set the stage for estimating treatment effects in schooling. Although it is quite hazardous to hypothesize realistic benchmarks for results from meta-analyses, because of the dependency of effect sizes on subject matter area, grade level, and study characteristics, a…