Value-added “Primer”

1. Value-added “Primer”

2. Accountability… • FROM – “lagging indicators” • TO – “leading indicators” • FROM – “intellectual address” • TO – “signposts on a journey”

3. Students don’t have value-added scores – but teachers & schools do! • Calculated as the “value” that is added to a student’s learning by working with a teacher and/or within a particular school. • Each student serves as his/her own “control.” • Past 2-3 years of a student’s performance are analyzed. • Sanders’ (BFK) model also calculates & includes an additional estimate to account for the effects (good or bad) of past teachers – referred to as a “layered model”.

4. A conceptual overview of the general model.

5. Student Estimation Model • The difference between each student’s estimated expected performance & their actual performance – a “residual variance” – is attributed to the effect of the teacher and school. • When these “residuals” are brought together, we can get a VALUE ADDED score for a teacher, a grade, a school, or a district. We group all the kids that are relevant for whatever “slice” of the educational picture we wish to see.

6. The Value of “value-added” ratings • Because each value-added score is a measure of the actual teacher effect versus what the teacher effect was EXPECTED to be, it is in some ways “content-neutral” and “grade-neutral”. That is, we can talk about how effective any teacher is (per the test results anyway) in comparable fashion, making these ratings potentially very helpful in decisions about school improvement and teacher professional development support.

7. How do “VA” ratings tell us about what the teachers or schools are doing? Quintile Groupings • To get a better idea of how schools and teachers are doing with various groups of kids, the Sanders / BFK model breaks both kids and teachers into “quintiles” – that is, chunks of 20% each, low to high…

8. A Final Note… • We can’t estimate quintile performance for individual teachers, because the odds are good that s/he has 1) not enough students and 2) students clustered by ability quintiles, so that our estimates would be hard to interpret. • We DO have enough kids in a school, however, to look at quintile-based performance, and this is where we can examine the SCHOOL level choices of support for education.

9. Kids that are ALMOST but not quite passing the tests are about here…

10. Often, we see grade levels or schools that are neglecting their very high or very low end kids in order to make accountability measures in the short term…

11. Similarly, schools can do very well with all their kids, but have many still not pass exams. The value-added measures provide another view of the work of the teachers and the school.Note that sometimes, school achievement ratings and “value-added” or growth measures are NOT the same.In fact, schools can be any combination of low to high achieving and low to high value-adding.