Ongoing or recently completed across the United States are a series of lawsuits via which teacher plaintiffs are contesting how they are being evaluated using value-added models (VAMs) as part of states'/districts' teacher accountability systems. To investigate the empirical and pragmatic matters addressed in court, researchers conducted a case…

School value-added models are widely applied to study, monitor, and hold schools to account for school differences in student learning. The traditional model is a mixed-effects linear regression of student current achievement on student prior achievement, background characteristics, and a school random intercept effect. The latter is referred to…

School accountability systems increasingly hold schools to account for their performances using value-added models purporting to measure the effects of schools on student learning. The most common approach is to fit a linear regression of student current achievement on student prior achievement, where the school effects are the school means of the…

Contemporary teacher evaluation policies are built upon multiple-measure systems including, primarily, teacher-level value-added and observational estimates. However, researchers have not yet investigated how using these indicators to evaluate teachers might distort validity, especially when one indicator seemingly trumps, or is trusted over the…

Using the nonparametric Mann-Whitney U-Test to analyze 128 survey responses from K-12 teachers, this paper considers how value-added measures (VAM) impact educators' decisions to include Latinx topics in their social studies lessons. The authors found that VAM teachers are more likely to rely on district/state curriculum standards whereas non-VAM…

Education systems around the world increasingly rely on school value-added models to monitor school performance and hold schools to account. These models typically focus on a limited number of academic outcomes. We explore how the traditional multilevel modelling approach to school value-added models can be extended to simultaneously analyse…

The transition to new assessments aligned to the Common Core State Standards was a significant turning point in the standards' implementation. Concerns about the transition led districts to suspend the use of value-added scores for evaluating teachers, but changes to other measures, such as classroom observations, were rare. Using data from the…

Empirical results are consistent with the hypothesis that socioeconomic factors contribute to initial disparities in performance that are perpetuated by demoralizing grading, testing, and grouping practices throughout the K-12 years. The hypothesis may explain why the achievement gap increases after children enter the school system, why Black…

Although schools' relative contribution to pupils' progress is increasingly used in accountability systems around the world, momentum for value-added models (VAM) has not been reached in Chile. This small-scale study explores qualitatively the policy context in which this omission takes place, by analyzing policy documents and interviewing local…

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…

Recent lawsuits reveal common mistakes plaguing current teacher evaluation systems. Drawing on arguments in court documents for prominent cases, the authors find that evaluation systems using value-added measures (VAM) suffer from a) inconsistent and unreliable teacher ratings, b) bias toward and against teachers of certain types of students, c)…

For this study, researchers critically reviewed documents pertaining to the highest profile of the 15 teacher evaluation lawsuits that occurred throughout the U.S. as pertaining to the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers. In New Mexico, teacher plaintiffs contested how they were being evaluated and held accountable using a homegrown…

Nations, states, and districts must choose among an array of different approaches to measuring school effectiveness in implementing their accountability policies, and the choice can be difficult because different approaches yield different results. This study compares two approaches to computing school effectiveness: a "beating the odds"…

Education systems focus on issues related to school effects and differences. School effects are used as a basis for accountability in various countries including China. This study investigated the stability and cross-disciplinary consistency of value-added estimates based on student scores in selected schools in a city in central China. The…

Background/Context: Closing achievement gaps is a major concern in U.S. education. These gaps can develop in a wide range of ways over the course of a student's schooling. Yet, research on school effectiveness and accountability policies for schools often focuses on rank orderings of schools based on value-added models, which could mask those…