Over the last decade, teacher evaluation based on value-added models (VAMs) has become central to the public debate over education policy. In this commentary, we critique and deconstruct the arguments proposed by the authors of a highly publicized study that linked teacher value-added models to students’ long-run outcomes, Chetty et al. (2014, forthcoming), in their response to the American Statistical Association statement on VAMs. We draw on recent academic literature to support our counter-arguments along main points of contention: causality of VAM estimates, transparency of VAMs, effect of non-random sorting of students on VAM estimates and sensitivity of VAMs to model specification.
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Assessments of what others have just done is an ongoing concern in everyday interaction. What we have learned about the working of these assessments might help us think through the consequences of the more formal assessments associated with teaching and learning in schools.
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This paper considers future educational assessment in terms of principles of evidential reasoning, focusing the discussion on the changes to the claims our assessments must support, the types of evidence needed to support these claims, and the statistical tools available to evaluate our evidence vis-à-vis the claims. An expanded view of assessment is advanced in which assessments based on multiple evidence sources from contextually rich situated learning environments, including unconventional data regarding human competencies, improve our ability to make valid inferences and decisions all education stakeholders.
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This article challenges the presumption that the educational testing of students provides objective information about such students.
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The article provides a rationale for the focus on assessment for learning, that is to assist and improve performance, as opposed to the prevalent approach of assessment of learning, focused on time constrained summative judgments. In the article, we also discuss the likely changes wrought by new and unstable knowledge, technology, and global competition, in the light of democratic educational approaches.
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This paper makes 13 claims about what educational assessment must do if it is to remain relevant in the face of rapid and potentially dramatic changes in education and society.
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This article explains the idea of a neopragmatic postmodernist test theory and offers some thoughts about what changing notions concerning the nature of and meanings assigned to knowledge imply for educational assessment, present and future. Reprinted with permission from Transitions in Work and Learning: Implications for Assessment, 1997, by the National Academy of Sciences, Courtesy of the National Academies Press, Washington, D.C.
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In the stories of exorbitant costs and incompetence, teacher tenure laws have achieved mythic proportions. Judge Rolf Treu’s tentative decision in Vergara v. California may be the death knell for teacher tenure. But what will change as a result? A look to the past reveals that teacher tenure never really protected teachers and nor was it supposed to. Using history as a lens, this commentary explores the origination of tenure policies and the debates that surrounded them. This commentary argues that embedded in the tenure debates is a much larger problem that should concern us all.
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In this brief reflection I seek to propose an alternative way of thinking about international rankings for universities, decoupling them from the logic of the market and instead linking them to the university’s mission as a space concerned with educating the public and producing knowledge for the common good. For this purpose, I draw from the example of the Universidad de Buenos Aires.
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This article explores the extent to which students’ precollege exposure to racial/ethnic difference within schools, neighborhoods, and friendship groups predicts their complex racial attitudes upon entering college.
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This article examines major stakeholder’s beliefs in higher education related to the changing faculty—moving to largely non-tenure track. Through the use of the policy Delphi method, we document four distinctive belief systems of a future faculty model among key stakeholders and describe the implications for educational policy.
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In an era of educational accountability, elementary social studies is at risk of increased marginalization as it competes for instructional time with English/language arts, math, and science. This quantitative study incorporated multilevel modeling to examine the association among elementary practitioners’ sense of instructional autonomy, teaching context, and state-level testing policies on reported social studies instructional time.
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