Teacher-Level Value-Added Models on Trial: Empirical and Pragmatic Issues of Concern Across Five Court Cases

Abstract

Ongoing or recently completed across the United States are a series of lawsuits via which teacher plaintiffs are contesting how they are being evaluated using value-added models (VAMs) as part of states’/districts’ teacher accountability systems. To investigate the empirical and pragmatic matters addressed in court, researchers conducted a case study analysis of the documents submitted for five such cases. Researchers framed analyses using measurement concepts resident within the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing, given issues with (a) reliability, (b) validity, (c) bias, (d) transparency, and (e) fairness, with emphases also on (f) whether VAMs are being used to make consequential decisions using concrete (e.g., not arbitrary) evidence, and (g) whether VAMs’ unintended consequences are also of legal pertinence and concern.

Putting teacher evaluation systems on the map: An overview of states' teacher evaluation systems post–Every Student Succeeds Act

“…Finally, the myriad lawsuits filed between teacher unions and state departments of education over the last decade (Education Week, 2015; see also Amrein-Beardsley & Close, 2019) may have driven some of the philosophical changes noted, especially in terms of more cooperative and formative, and less punitive and consequential teacher evaluation systems. Some state department personnel cited that new teacher evaluation systems with a focus on stakeholder involvement even changed teachers' and state leaders' relationships from "combative to cooperative."…”

Sustainability of Evaluation: The Origin and Development of Value-Added Evaluation from the Global Perspective

“…Of course, there are shortcomings in any model. Some studies have conducted special analysis on the errors and deviations of value-added evaluation models [70][71][72] and the effectiveness of different value-added models is also questioned [73,74].…”

Do disadvantaged schools have poorer teachers? Rethinking assumptions about the relationship between teaching quality and school-level advantage

“…Furthermore, VAMs are sensitive to class composition, yielding inconsistent results for individual teachers over time (Darling-Hammond et al, 2012 ). Therefore, while VAMS give insight into factors that promote student achievement growth, they have been labelled by courts in America as largely ‘unfair’ measures of teacher performance (Amrein-Beardsley & Close, 2019 ), particularly when used in high-stakes situations and on their own.…”