Value-added models have become popular fixes for various accountability schemes aimed at measuring teacher effectiveness. Value-added models may resolve some of the issues in accountability models, but they bring their own set of challenges to the table. Unfortunately, political and emotional considerations sometimes keep one from examining…

The formula is simple: Highly effective teachers equal student academic success. Yet, the physics of American education is anything but. Thus, the question facing education reformers is how can teacher effectiveness be accurately measured in order to improve the teacher workforce? Given the demand for objective, quantitative measures of teacher…

Nonrandom assignment of students to teachers can bias value-added estimates of teachers' causal effects. Rothstein (2008, 2010) shows that typical value-added models indicate large counterfactual effects of fifth-grade teachers on students' fourth-grade learning, indicating that classroom assignments are far from random. This article quantifies…

This article considers potential impediments to the estimation of teacher quality caused primarily by the purposeful behavior of families, administrators, and teachers. The discussion highlights the benefits of accounting for student and school differences through a value-added modeling approach that incorporates a student's history of family,…

Extensive education research on the contribution of teachers to student achievement produces two generally accepted results. First, teacher quality varies substantially as measured by the value added to student achievement or future academic attainment or earnings. Second, variables often used to determine entry into the profession and…

The concept is simple and attractive: Evaluate teachers on the basis of how much academic growth their students experience over the course of the school year. Often referred to as "value-added," this concept and the statistical methods for implementing it have been a topic of debate in state legislatures and at state and national…

Mounting pressure in the policy arena to improve teacher productivity either by improving signals that predict teacher performance or through creating incentive contracts based on performance--has spurred two related questions: Are there important determinants of teacher productivity that are not captured by teacher credentials but that can be…

In this article, the author discusses the new role assessment is playing in the higher education (HE) arena. Highlighted are the feelings of higher education faculty who observe the lack of preparation of students entering HE, and the fact that in introductory courses they are often teaching the skills--writing, critical thinking, basic…

Value-added models in education research allow researchers to explore how a wide variety of policies and measured school inputs affect the academic performance of students. Researchers typically quantify the impacts of such interventions in terms of "effect sizes", i.e., the estimated effect of a one standard deviation change in the…

Dismissals for ineffective teaching, as distinguished from insubordination, immorality, or improper treatment of students, are rare because standards of teaching against which to juxtapose an individual teacher's behavior have not been available. However, abstract performance standards for teachers are beginning to emerge from research on teaching…

Value-added modeling (VAM) to estimate school and teacher effects is currently of considerable interest to researchers and policymakers. Recent reports suggest that VAM demonstrates the importance of teachers as a source of variance in student outcomes. Policymakers see VAM as a possible component of education reform through improved teacher…