Education yardstick imprecise

Your mostly reasonable Jan. 17 editorial regarding education reform unfortunately misses a central sticking point: Teachers and schools cannot reliably or validly be evaluated using student standardized test score data.

On today’s education battlefield, a complicated formula has been developed to “measure” student “progress” using standardized test scores as the sole determinant of learning. This so-called Value Added Measurement (VAM) purports to measure the “value” a teacher adds to student learning.

Bill O’Leary, writing in the May 18, 2014, Washington Post, revealed major professional statistical and testing associations that warn against using VAM to evaluate teachers or schools. The American Statistical Association, the largest organization of its type in America, flatly states that VAM scores “do not directly measure potential teacher contributions toward other student outcomes.”

The National Academy of Sciences warns that VAM is “far too unstable to be considered fair or reliable.” The Educational Testing Service’s Policy Information Center warns that there are “too many pitfalls to making causal attributions of teacher effectiveness (with VAM) … ” And, finally, Rand Corporation researchers characterize VAM as “too imprecise to support … the desired inferences.”

Andy James

Colville