The Problem With Value-Added (you can change

The modern “accountability movement ” of school reform requires schools and teachers to be constantly rated and compared. Though schools and teachers have always been evaluated—teachers by their supervisors, and schools by higher-level administrators—reformers have declared these evaluations broken. Their rationale is that many students are not passing their standardized tests. The teachers and the schools responsible for this clear case of educational neglect, they say, have never been punished appropriately. Schools, up until recently, have not been closed down for poor performance. Under-performing teachers have been spared the pink slips they so deserve. The reason that “failing ” schools and “ineffective ” teachers have managed to get satisfactory ratings, they continue, is that evaluations have been based solely on measuring somewhat subjective inputs, like what the teacher and school can be observed doing, rather than objective outputs, which are the result of those teacher and school inputs—th