Audrey Amrein Beardsley has been studying William Sanders’ value-added assessment system for a decade or so, and she is no fan of his methodology.
William Sanders has argued that his methodology is not volatile, but Beardsley and other critics say otherwise.
TVAAS or EVAAS is highly controversial, yet Arne Duncan praised it and claimed that Tennessee made great strides because it uses Sanders’ methods.
Beardsley makes the following observations (she has many more links, and I can’t copy them all, so I urge you to read her article and follow the links to understand the evidence she cites):
Sanders and others (including state leaders and even U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan) have lauded Tennessee’s use of accountability instruments, like the TVAAS, for Tennessee’s large gains on the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) outcomes. Others, however, have cautioned against this celebration because 1) the results mask the expanding achievement gap in Tennessee; 2) the state’s lowest socioeconomic students continue to perform poorly on the test; 3) Tennessee didn’t make gains significantly different than many other states; and 4) other states with similar accountability instruments and policies (e.g., Colorado, Louisiana) did not make similar gains, while states without such instruments and policies (e.g., Kentucky, Iowa, Washington) did make similar gains (I should add that Kentucky’s achievement gap is also narrowing and their lowest socioeconomic students have made significant gains). Claiming that NAEP scores increased because of TVAAS-use and other stringent accountability policies is completely unwarranted (see also this article in Education Week).
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The public schools in California have always had accountability measures. I remember as far back as the early 1980s the nervousness when accreditation rolled around and a team of administrators and teachers from other districts arrived to make sure the school where I taught was meeting all of its state mandated requirements.
Every public school in the state went through this on a routine schedule. These investigations included one on one, private meetings with teachers with a guarantee that whatever they said to the investigating committee would be kept confident from the district’s administration. They also met with a random selection of students.
These inspections were in-depth and thorough from the physical elements of the school, to the management and the curriculum.
It was a big deal and if the school passed with flying colors and didn’t have to worry for a few more years, they were jubilant but if there were concerns and the accreditation team would return the next year for a follow up, administration went into overdrive to address any shortfalls in the school’s master plan and make sure they were fixed before that next inspection rolled around.
Is this happening in the private sector, for profit charters? I don’t think so.
A fact that is missing in this debate is that the unions, at least in California, were never involved in these inspections or the development and implementation of curriculum. The unions don’t hire or train teachers. The union had nothing to do with the grades the kids earned. The union had nothing to do with the standardized tests or their development. The union’s role was to be there when negotiating contracts that dealt with pay, health and retirement issues and to step in when due process was involved to make sure the teacher being accused of incompetence or a moral charge wasn’t being railroaded unjustly.
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Reblogged this on peakmemory and commented:
More about value added measures of teaching
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