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…

Various sociological perspectives have been applied to facilitate school choice research over the past two decades, as showcased in this "2020 Yearbook of Politics of Education Association." Among them, Pierre Bourdieu's concepts and theories stand out as a catalyst for the field's sociological development. My first objective in this…

Despite the concerns regarding value-added models (VAMs), advocates hold strong to VAMs' theoretical strengths and potentials, while adopting a set of agreed-upon albeit "heroic" set of assumptions, without research in support. These assumptions transcend promotional, policy, media, and research-based pieces, but they have never been…

State policy makers are constantly looking for ways to improve teacher quality. An oft tried method is to increase the rigor of licensure exams. This study utilizes state administrative data from Arkansas to determine whether raising the cut-scores on licensure exams would improve the quality of the teacher workforce. In addition, the study…

The specifics of how growth models should be constructed and used for educational evaluation is a topic of lively policy debate in states and school districts nationwide. In this article, we take up the question of model choice--framed within a policy context--and examine three competing approaches. The first approach, reflected in the popular…

School districts across the United States increasingly use value-added models (VAMs) to evaluate teachers. In practice, VAMs typically rely on lagged test scores from the previous academic year, which necessarily conflate summer with school-year learning and potentially bias estimates of teacher effectiveness. We investigate the practical…

Currently, a significant number of states are in the process of implementing a high-stakes teacher evaluation (HSTE) system. In many ways, Louisiana's teacher evaluation system, "Compass," is typical of the models that many states have adopted. This article reports the experiences of 37 elementary teachers from five districts across…

Educators struggle with "value-added" teacher evaluation models based on high-stakes student assessments. Despite validity and reliability threats, these models evaluate university-based teacher preparation programs (TPPs), and play a role in state and professional accreditation. This study reports a more rational value-added evaluation…