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: The Buck Stops Here

Should a Teacher's Value-Added Last Forever?

By Stuart Buck, Esq.

In the middle of a review of a recent Gates Foundation report on teacher value-added scores, economist Jesse Rothstein writes this: An extensive literature makes clear that students assigned to high-value-added teachers see higher test scores in the year of that assignment, but that this benefit evaporates very quickly.He cites, among other things, a Jacob/Lefgren/Sims paper arguing that: the vast majority of the contemporary test score effect attributed to teacher value-added is transitory. This suggests that the teacher value-added literature overstates the effect of teachers on longrun learning and, therefore, the ability of policies that target teacher value-added to change ultimate student outcomes. For some reason, the short-lived effect of teacher value-added scores is seen as somehow disproving their worth, and the worth of policies that would "target teacher value-added...continue to full post

Full post as published by The Buck Stops Here on January 20, 2011 (boomark / email).