Public schools with impressive records of serving lower-performing students are often overlooked because their average test scores, even when students are growing quickly, are lower than scores in schools that serve higher-performing students. Schools may appear to be doing poorly either because baseline achievement is not easily accounted for or…

Value-added modeling (VAM), one class of statistical models used to estimate individual teacher's or school's contribution to student achievement based on student test score growth between consecutive years, has become increasingly popular in the last decades. Despite the increasing popularity of VAM, many researchers are concerned about the…

The growing availability of data linking students to classroom teachers has made it possible to estimate the contribution teachers make to student achievement. While there is a growing consensus that teacher quality is important and current evaluation systems are inadequate, many have expressed concerns over the use of value-added measures (VAMs)…