Teacher evaluation systems can have high stakes for individual teachers, and it's important to ask how new evaluation models—including value-added measures—serve teachers as they strive to improve their practice. The authors interviewed teachers at a high-performing New York City school about their reactions to their value-added scores and whether they had changed their teaching practices in response to what they learned through these scores. They found that these teachers placed very little importance on their VAM scores and didn't believe this data could help them improve their teaching—but weren't threatened by VAM ratings. However, the authors discuss other instances of teachers who faced serious consequences and even decided to leave teaching because of a low VAM score. They conclude that evaluation methods based on value-added measures are unhelpful to teachers at best and demoralizing at worst.

How Does Value-Added Data Affect Teachers?

Aaron M. Pallas

How Does Value-Added Data Affect Teachers?- thumbnail

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Teacher engagement and motivation

Education policy

Assessment and grading

Professional development

Teacher effectiveness and evaluation

"We can always construct rules and algorithms that will assign someone an unequivocal rating; but without the appropriate context, this rating will appear to be much more precise than in actually is," writes Pallas in this critical analysis of the practice of publicly releasing teacher valued-added scores. Using the examples of New York City and Los Angeles, Pallas shows that publicizing and comparing teacher value-added scores is unfair and misleading. Advocates of this practice, he writes, claim that parents have a right to know teachers' ratings so that they can select the "best" teachers for their children. But this claim makes no sense because the ratings actually provide little useful information, as Pallas demonstrates in an examination of the value-added scores of 2,656 4th grade teachers in New York City.

Aaron M. Pallas

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Articles by Aaron M.

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