Audrey Amrein-Beardsley has just published a new book that explains value-added measurement (VAM). It is now available for pre-order.
Having been a classroom teacher and now a university scholar, Beardsley takes a highly critical view of simplistic approaches to teacher evaluation.
Here are her chapter headings.
“Paperback: 256 pages; Chapters: 8 and titled as follows:
Socially Engineering the Road to Utopia
Value-Added Models (VAMs) and the Human Factor
A VAMoramic View of the Nation
Assumptions Used as Rationales and Justifications
Test-Based, Statistical, and Methodological Assumptions
Reliability and Validity
Bias and the Random Assignment of Students into Classrooms
Alternatives, Solutions, and Conclusions”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
cool. I will be ordering this
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Congratulations.
I hope that the limited number of author copies includes a special delivery to Arne Duncan. If so, I’ll pay for a spare to send to President Obama. I will buy this at my local bookstore…another great institution that needs suppot.
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Are you still realistically hopeful that President Obama can be persuaded to reverse the testing policies of the Department of Education or are you being sarcastic here?
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Stop what you are doing. Read this book. I feel like an expert on VAM and I am only half way through. We need to make sure all educators read this book. VAM may become our destiny, if we do not take action. We need to understand the fallacious assumptions tunderlying VAM so we can effectively challenge our candidates and policy makers.
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