Value-Added Measurement of schoolteacher performance

Value-Added Measurement of schoolteacher performance essay assignment

Value-Added Measurement of schoolteacher performance: Case Study essay assignment

Over the last few decades, there has been much public discussion of how to measure teacher effectiveness. Some schools rely on students’ test scores, other rely on classroom observations. One more recent approach uses statistical analysis of children’s test score improvement to provide an assessment of how well a teacher is performing. The idea is to try and pinpoint how much a student has improved over the past year and how much of this can be attributed to the teacher.

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The method, called value-added measurement, works like this: based on a student’s past performance history, a model is calculated to predict how well the student should be performing in the current year. It also ties the student’s performance to individual teachers and subjects to see whether the student is doing better or worse than would be expected from past years, and whether that change can be attributed to the teacher. If the student does much better than expected, the teacher gets a high rating. If the student does worse, the teacher gets a low grade.

As might be expected, there are some differences of opinion about this measure of teacher performance. While some argue that this approach to assessing teacher performance is fair because it looks to tie student gains to individual performance and who their teachers were during that time, others note that the approach does not take into account what teachers are actually doing in the classroom (or an extremely time relevant example, what is happening outside of the classroom). However, others point out that value-added measurement can provide one additional bit of information to see how well teachers are performing.

Choose 3 of the following 6 prompts to respond to:

 

  • How would you classify value-added measurement – is it subjective or objective?
  • Is value-added measurement primarily a measure of task performance, contextual performance, or both?
  • What do you see as its weaknesses, and what other types of measures of teacher performance might compensate for these weaknesses?
  • If you were in the position of assessing teacher performance, what would you use (list 2)? Describe the strengths and weaknesses of each of these sources.
  • One analysis found that the wealthiest school districts are three times more likely to have teachers with high value-added scores that poor districts? What are the contextual factors that may have cause this? Does this mean it is unfair?
  • Consider the multiple stakeholders in this case: parents, students, teachers, and administrators. What would the viewpoint be of each of these administrators regarding value-added measurement?