Audrey Amrein-Beardsley is one of the nation’s leading experts on teacher evaluation. She has the advantage of having been a middle school math teacher before she became a scholar so she has a deeper understanding of the classroom than many other experts in the field.

Audrey A-B has just started her own blog, where she will have ample opportunity to spread light on the facts and myths about value-added assessment and other test-based forms of teacher evaluation.

Here are her first contributions. See VAMunition; read why VAMs and merit pay are not fair; read how teachers are more “accountable” for test scores than ever before.

I look forward to reporting on her work regularly, as she can help all of us wade through the dense manure that surrounds one of the hottest topics in education today.

By the way, Audrey A-B will be publishing a book on this topic next spring, which will show how useless most value-added assessment is. I have read an early copy of the book and can’t wait for it to appear in print so that you can read it too. If we are incredibly lucky, people on the staff of the nation’s policymakers will read it, and perhaps some policy might be informed by evidence instead of their own bad hunches or the herd impulse that now governs federal and state policy.