Audrey Amrein-Beardsley has devoted a large portion of her professional life to criticizing the work of William Sanders, creator of the value-added model for measuring teacher effectiveness. She reports in this post that he passed away at his Tennessee home at the age of 74.

Sanders’ model was tried out first in Tennessee in the late 1980s and then widely disseminated to other states. Many teachers lost their jobs because they didn’t get the gain scores that the Sanders’ model predicted.

Sanders was trained in animal genetics. His hometown obituary reports that:

He received a bachelors of Science degree in animal science in 1964, and a doctorate in Statistics and Quantitative Genetics in 1968….

Beginning in 1972, Sanders created and led a statistical and consulting group for the Institute of Agricultural Research for The University of Tennessee system. Over the next 28 years, Sanders worked with scientists to plan experiments and analyze the resulting data on research projects ranging from agronomy to physics. One of his research projects modeled the nutrient flow in the Peace River system in Florida, which proved that the environmental degradation in the Gulf was not a function of the development along the west coast as was previously thought but rather was a result of the phosphate mining activity in Central Florida. Other projects were as wide ranging as developing a forecasting system for Bike Athletic to improve forecasts for over 2,500 different inventory units to working with a longtime friend to develop a process that improved calibration of an invention that measures fiber properties.

He achieved lasting fame by transferring his attention from agricultural assessments to teacher assessments. He seemed never to recognize that assessing the effectiveness of teachers was far more complicated than studying animals and plants, which may be raised in a controlled environment.

Although his methodology was critiqued by scholars like Amrein-Beardsley, the American Statistical Association, and the American Educational Research Association, Sanders continued to peddle it to credulous school board members looking for a simple formula to determine teacher “effectiveness.”

Amrein-Beardsley writes:

Sanders thought that educators struggling with student achievement in the state should “simply” use more advanced statistics, similar to those used when modeling genetic and reproductive trends among cattle, to measure growth, hold teachers accountable for that growth, and solve the educational measurement woes facing the state of Tennessee at the time. It was to be as simple as that…. I should also mention that given this history, not surprisingly, Tennessee was one of the first states to receive Race to the Top funds to the tune of $502 million to further advance this model; hence, this has also contributed to this model’s popularity across the nation.

Arne Duncan too bought the horse manure that Sanders was selling and that he patented. Keeping his methodology secret and proprietary posed a challenge to scholars. But there were always buyers, no matter what the scholars said. States that wanted to be eligible for Race to the Top funding had to adopt a test-based evaluation system, which was a boon for Sanders’ model.