Value-added what?

I don’t think it’s come to Michigan yet, but it should soon. Value-added assessment models are already big stuff in Ohio and some other states. A mathematician named John Ewing writes about what he sees as problems with value-added modeling, and the dangers of using it for teacher evaluation:

With all that accumulating data, it was inevitable that people would want to use tests to evaluate everything educational–not merely teachers, schools, and entire states but also new curricula, teacher training programs, or teacher selection criteria. Are the new standards better than the old? Are experienced teachers better than novice? Do teachers need to know the content they teach? Using data from tests to answer such questions is part of the current “student achievement” ethos–the belief that the goal of education is to produce high test scores. But it is also part of a broader trend in modern society to place a higher value on numerical (objective) measurements than verbal (subjective) evidence. But using tests to evaluate teachers, schools, or programs has many problems.