Education reform has existed at some policy and public levels since at least the 1890s in the U.S. The current reform movement grounded in state-based accountability began in the early 1980s with a Nation at Risk, and then was nationalized in 2001 with No Child Left Behind.
In the first decades of the recent accountability era, standards and high-stakes testing were implemented and periodically revised at the state level with the primary focus being on student and school accountability. The current cycle, however, has seen an increase in policies and practices aimed at teacher accountability and increasing teacher quality—despite a solid research base showing that teacher quality constitutes only 10-15% of measurable student outcomes (test data).
The focus on increasing teacher quality and accountability has included both experiments and policies with value added methods (VAM) of determining teacher quality in order to label, rank, sort, and retain or dismiss teachers. VAM claims to isolate teacher quality through pre- and post-testing methods that seek to identify teacher quality and isolate that from the other factors reflected in test scores.
Before policy-makers and stakeholders in education commit to reforming teacher evaluation and retention, foundational questions must be addressed, and then the current facts about VAM must be acknowledged.
First, the foundational questions:
(1) What evidence exists identifying teacher quality as a primary or significant problem facing a school or district? Where, then, does teacher quality rank as a priority for a school, district, or state in terms of cost effectiveness in committing funding to the reform?
(2) Are all elements of implementing VAM at any percentage to the revised teacher evaluation process valid for determining teacher quality? In other words, what measures are taken to account for using student test scores (designed to reflect student learning, and not designed to reflect teacher quality) as data points for teacher quality?
(3) Have the teaching and learning environments for students’ home and schools been addressed to insure equitable teaching and learning environments in which determining teacher quality becomes valid?
Next, what is the current knowledge base about VAM*?:
(1) Including VAM at any percentage in reformed teacher evaluation models is currently in the experimental phase. Data and the validity of including VAM are being tested, but almost no researchers currently claim VAM (at any percentage but certainly at high percentages such as 40-50%) to be ready for widespread implementation.
(2) VAM models for labeling teacher quality are highly unstable. Teacher rankings tend to shift with new populations of students.
(3) Researchers agree that VAM is unlikely ever to be completely stable; thus, it is possible that VAM will never be a practical or fair element in teacher evaluation, particularly at the individual teacher level or in any single year.
(4) The statistical and practical requirements to isolate teacher quality in student test scores pose tremendous costs in time and funding that also may prove to be not cost effective in the context of most school systems’ priorities. In order to implement a fair and equitable teacher evaluation system that includes VAM at any percentage, states must create and implement pre- and post-tests to all students in all teachers’ courses, creating a new and costly commitment to education funding.
(5) Decades of research on high-stakes testing have shown many negative unintended consequences to accountability measures focusing on students and schools; including VAM in high-stakes accountability policies focusing on teachers is likely to have similar unintended negative consequences such as discouraging high-quality teachers from working with high-needs populations of students.
Thus, policy-makes and stakeholders are strongly cautioned to consider education reform priorities, the experimental nature of VAM, and the current knowledge base on VAM before committing tax dollars to either field testing or implementing new teacher evaluation policies built in any way on VAM.
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 
4 thoughts on “VAM: A Primer”