Comments on: Are Value-Added Effectiveness Measures Good Enough to Use for Compensation Decisions?

By: driver13

driver13 — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 09:59:25 +0000

We hope it will also strengthen the case for not only recognizing the enormous talents, assets, and contributions of young people, but also ensuring them greater opportunities to make a difference in their communities, and in our world. ,

By: His_wife74

His_wife74 — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 10:37:59 +0000

Shirley Cochran based upon a speech given by Professor Ellen E. ,

By: Anne Truitt Zelenka » links for 2009-09-25

Anne Truitt Zelenka » links for 2009-09-25 — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 16:08:08 +0000

[...] Are Value-Added Effectiveness Measures Good Enough to Use for Compensation Decisions? « The Quick a… Good overview of current research into stability of VAMs for assessing teacher effectiveness. (tags: teaching education research teacher-quality value-added-models) [...]

By: Kate McKean

Kate McKean — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 19:30:00 +0000

Regarding Dan’s comment –

Taking the outliers (bottom quintile) and saying that the results are “not bad” because *half* of bottom-scorers stayed in the bottom *2* quintiles (nearly half the distribution)….well, that’s just spin. It is NOT “high predictive value.”

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 22:09:00 +0000

How good is good enough? Your statement "Advance degrees have been consistently shown to have no impact of teacher effectiveness" is interesting and I'd like to see the source of that. This seems to be counter to the research that teachers with more extensive education in their content (advanced degrees, I assume) are more effective at teaching that content.

The feeling I get is that the recommended approach might be to identify early the quality teachers and fire the rest (since they don't improve with time or education).

Regarding 'evaluations': these are uniformly the (biased) opinions/judgments of poorly trained observers (administrators or mentors). I would rather see the observations based on objective data on teacher and student behavior such as gathered by the eCOVE Observation Software. At least it would be consistent and an objective basis for decisions.

By: Dan

Dan — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 17:32:00 +0000

The predictive values of pre-tenure VA are actually quite high if you consider the fact that about 55% of bottom quintile teachers pre-tenure stay in the bottom TWO quintiles post-tenure and about 75% of top quintile teachers pre-tenure stay in the top TWO quintiles post-tenure. That’s pretty good reliability of post-tenure impact that is above or below average. In addition, the fact that about 20% of top quintile teachers pre-tenure end up in the bottom quintile post tenure is a strong argument against tenure as a concept. Why should teachers have a decision-point early in their careers that guarantees job security indefinitely thereafter as opposed to a rigorous but fair evaluation system that applies throughout their careers (like other professionals)?

By: john thompson

john thompson — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 14:45:00 +0000

Wondefful, wondeful post! I’ll print out the studies and study them carefully before commenting. Its clear, however, that Manwaring has a great head on his shoulders. He’s demonstrating wisdom as well as sociasl science professionalism.

This is just one more reason why I’m growing more optimistic about NCLB II. Finally we are asking the right questions.