Value-added models try to separate the contribution of individual teachers or schools to students' learning growth measured by standardized test scores. There is a policy trend to use value-added modeling to evaluate teachers because of its face validity and superficial objectiveness. This article investigates the potential long term consequences…

Improving teacher evaluation is one of the most pressing but also contested areas of educational policy. Value-added measures have received much of the attention in new evaluation systems, but they can only be used to evaluate a fraction of teachers. Classroom observations are almost universally used to assess teachers, yet their statistical…

Charter schools represent an increasingly important form of school choice in the United States. Charter schools are public schools, with a difference. Compared to traditional public schools, they are exempted from some of the state laws and regulations that govern traditional public schools. In this way, parents come to have a greater number of…

Papay (2011) noticed that teacher value-added measures (VAMs) from a statistical model using the most common pre/post testing timeframe--current-year spring relative to previous spring (SS)--are essentially unrelated to those same teachers' VAMs when instead using next-fall relative to current-fall (FF). This is concerning since this choice--made…

In 2018, The RAND Corporation and the American Institutes for Research (AIR) published an evaluation of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching (IP) initiative, which was designed to improve achievement among low-income minority (LIM) students. The initiative provided support for several reforms that…

Disrupted schooling can heavily impact the amount of education pupils receive. Starting in early June of 2011 a huge social outburst of pupil protests, walk-outs, riots and school occupations called the Chilean Winter caused more than 8 million of lost school days. Within a matter of days, riots reached the national level with hundreds of…

The release of institution-level earnings information as part of the Obama Administration's new College Scorecard data has already spawned new "value-added" rankings based on the economic outcomes of students who attended similar institutions. These emerging rankings are an improvement on simple unadjusted rankings, but the wide variance…

Novice teachers' professional contexts may have important implications for their effectiveness, development, and retention. However, descriptions of these contexts suffer from data limitations, resulting in unidimensional or vague characterizations. Using 10 years of administrative data from the Los Angeles Unified School District, we describe…

Value-added assessment methods have been criticized by researchers and policy makers for a number of reasons. One issue includes the sensitivity of model results across different outcome measures. This study examined the utility of incorporating multivariate latent variable approaches within a traditional value-added framework. We evaluated the…

Student peer effects are well documented; however, we know far less about peer effects among teachers. We hypothesize that a relatively effective teacher can positively affect the performance of his or her peers, whereas a relatively ineffective teacher may negatively affect the performance of other teachers with whom he or she works closely.…

Academic libraries are continually being asked to demonstrate their value. Showing benefits that provide financial value to the user community is one approach to meeting this challenge. With a focus on journal articles and monographs, the authors have analyzed course syllabi to determine the cost savings graduate students in psychology receive…

The use of student achievement data to evaluate an individual teacher's effectiveness has become a new focus in educational policy. This article focuses on the underresearched teacher perception of this new policy measure. Drawing on ethnographic research procedures, this article explores how first-grade teachers in one state navigated a new…

Although the paradox perspective is gaining increasing attention among management scholars, most of us continue to struggle with addressing this challenging topic in the classroom, as it seems out of reach for many students. In this article, we describe a potentially beneficial way to approach paradoxical thinking in management education: teaching…

The current study explored the size, stability, and consistency of school effects, using 2 effectiveness indicators: achievements of students at the end of primary school and growth in achievement across 3 years of schooling. The sample consisted of the scores of 25,269 students on 3 subjects, taken in Grades 4 to 6 among 3 cohorts in 319 primary…

One major implication of the Next Generation Science Standards is the need to integrate inquiry and practice and incorporate engineering into science education. To support teachers' change efforts in a time of heightened science, technology, engineering, and mathematics standards for all students, effective professional development (PD) is…