“Houston, We Have a Lawsuit”: A Cautionary Tale for the Implementation of Value-Added Models for High-Stakes Employment Decisions

Paige, Mark; Amrein‐Beardsley, Audrey

doi:10.3102/0013189x20923046

Cited by 13 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…Model performance is always limited by the model's assumptions and the data used to train it (e.g., Hastie et al, 2009;Alpaydin and Bach, 2014). This highlights the importance of transparency and clear communication in how these models are estimated, selected, and used, as is also underlined by recent lawsuits (Paige, 2020;Paige and Amrein-Beardsley, 2020).…”

Section: Ethical Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 93%

Contrasting Classical and Machine Learning Approaches in the Estimation of Value-Added Scores in Large-Scale Educational Data

et al. 2020

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There is no consensus on which statistical model estimates school value-added (VA) most accurately. To date, the two most common statistical models used for the calculation of VA scores are two classical methods: linear regression and multilevel models. These models have the advantage of being relatively transparent and thus understandable for most researchers and practitioners. However, these statistical models are bound to certain assumptions (e.g., linearity) that might limit their prediction accuracy. Machine learning methods, which have yielded spectacular results in numerous fields, may be a valuable alternative to these classical models. Although big data is not new in general, it is relatively new in the realm of social sciences and education. New types of data require new data analytical approaches. Such techniques have already evolved in fields with a long tradition in crunching big data (e.g., gene technology). The objective of the present paper is to competently apply these "imported" techniques to education data, more precisely VA scores, and assess when and how they can extend or replace the classical psychometrics toolbox. The different models include linear and non-linear methods and extend classical models with the most commonly used machine learning methods (i.e., random forest, neural networks, support vector machines, and boosting). We used representative data of 3,026 students in 153 schools who took part in the standardized achievement tests of the Luxembourg School Monitoring Program in grades 1 and 3. Multilevel models outperformed classical linear and polynomial regressions, as well as different machine learning models. However, it could be observed that across all schools, school VA scores from different model types correlated highly. Yet, the percentage of disagreements as compared to multilevel models was not trivial and real-life implications for individual schools may still be dramatic depending on the model type used. Implications of these results and possible ethical concerns regarding the use of machine learning methods for decision-making in education are discussed.

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Section: Ethical Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 93%

Contrasting Classical and Machine Learning Approaches in the Estimation of Value-Added Scores in Large-Scale Educational Data

et al. 2020

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“…Other cautionary and critical statements were made by the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) in 2015 (see https://www.nassp.org/ top-issues-in-education/position-statements/ for the most recent version, updated in 2019; National Association of Secondary School Principals, 2019) and the American Educational Research Association (American Educational Research Association Council, 2015). Several lawsuits challenging the consequences of teacher evaluation efforts were also instituted (see Paige and Amrein-Beardsley, 2020).…”

Section: Student Growth Measuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Insights in teacher education: 2022

2024

Frontiers Research Topics

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Frontiers is more than just an open access publisher of scholarly articles: it is a pioneering approach to the world of academia, radically improving the way scholarly research is managed. The grand vision of Frontiers is a world where all people have an equal opportunity to seek, share and generate knowledge. Frontiers provides immediate and permanent online open access to all its publications, but this alone is not enough to realize our grand goals. Frontiers journal seriesThe Frontiers journal series is a multi-tier and interdisciplinary set of openaccess, online journals, promising a paradigm shift from the current review, selection and dissemination processes in academic publishing. All Frontiers journals are driven by researchers for researchers; therefore, they constitute a service to the scholarly community. At the same time, the Frontiers journal series operates on a revolutionary invention, the tiered publishing system, initially addressing specific communities of scholars, and gradually climbing up to broader public understanding, thus serving the interests of the lay society, too. Dedication to qualityEach Frontiers article is a landmark of the highest quality, thanks to genuinely collaborative interactions between authors and review editors, who include some of the world's best academicians. Research must be certified by peers before entering a stream of knowledge that may eventually reach the public -and shape society; therefore, Frontiers only applies the most rigorous and unbiased reviews. Frontiers revolutionizes research publishing by freely delivering the most outstanding research, evaluated with no bias from both the academic and social point of view. By applying the most advanced information technologies, Frontiers is catapulting scholarly publishing into a new generation. What are Frontiers Research Topics?Frontiers Research Topics are very popular trademarks of the Frontiers journals series: they are collections of at least ten articles, all centered on a particular subject. With their unique mix of varied contributions from Original Research to Review Articles, Frontiers Research Topics unify the most influential researchers, the latest key findings and historical advances in a hot research area.

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“…After 2009, several unsuccessful lawsuits had been filed against the use of VA scores in decisions about teachers' remuneration or tenure, leaving many educators with smaller pay or without a contract at all after their VA-based assessment. In 2017, in the school district of Houston, TX in the US, however, the federal court ruled it unconstitutional to terminate a teacher's contract on the basis of undisclosed VA score data (45). Overall, VA scores have found most of their use in the US, which has led to several lawsuits against their use in high-stakes decisions in education policy.…”

Section: International Use Of Value-added Scoresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Value-Added Scores Show Limited Stability over Time in Primary School

Emslander¹,

Levy²,

Scherer³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Value-added (VA) models are used for accountability purposes and quantify the value a teacher or a school adds to their students’ achievement. If VA scores lack stability over time and vary across outcome domains (e.g., mathematics and language learning), their use for high-stakes decision making is in question and could have detrimental real-life implications: teachers could lose their jobs, or a school might receive less funding. However, school-level stability over time and variation across domains have rarely been studied together. In the present study, we examined the stability of VA scores over time for mathematics and language learning, drawing on representative, large-scale, and longitudinal data from two cohorts of standardized achievement tests in Luxembourg (N = 7,016 students in 151 schools). We found that only 34-38% of the schools showed stable VA scores over time with moderate rank correlations of VA scores from 2017 to 2019 of r = .34 for mathematics and r = .37 for language learning. Although they showed insufficient stability over time for high-stakes decision making, school VA scores could be employed to identify teaching or school practices that are genuinely effective—especially in heterogeneous student populations.

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“Houston, We Have a Lawsuit”: A Cautionary Tale for the Implementation of Value-Added Models for High-Stakes Employment Decisions

Cited by 13 publications

References 40 publications

Contrasting Classical and Machine Learning Approaches in the Estimation of Value-Added Scores in Large-Scale Educational Data

Contrasting Classical and Machine Learning Approaches in the Estimation of Value-Added Scores in Large-Scale Educational Data

Insights in teacher education: 2022

Value-Added Scores Show Limited Stability over Time in Primary School

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