"If the measures become important guides, they will lead schools to overemphasize the measured at the expense of the immeasurable," he wrote in a special issue of Peer Review, the journal of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, devoted to the debate over value-added testing.
Amidst the debate over value-added services vs. classic VC, what it really comes down to is picking the right partner to help you go down one of the most challenging paths of your life.
AT a time when recent graduates, age 24 and under, are experiencing a jobless rate of nearly 10 percent, a new study renews the debate over the value-added component of going to college.
The discrepancy highlights an ongoing debate about the value-added test scores that an increasing number of states are using to evaluate teachers.
Economists have also debated European-style value-added taxes, in which a tax is levied at each stage of production, and then when the item is sold to the final consumer.
But reporters Jason Song and Jason Felch, and the Times editorial board, have raised the use of value-added assessment to a matter of public debate.
Since Harvard and Columbia economists released a recent report connecting high-quality teachers to long-term positive outcomes for students, there has been much debate over the use of "value-added" measurements to identify effective teachers.
My worry for current teachers like myself is that the heated debate over the use of value-added measurements detracts from a productive movement towards raising the quality of instruction in all classrooms.
As value-added analysis is adopted — if not embraced — across the country, much of the debate has focused on its underlying mathematical formulas and their daunting complexity.
"There's a lot of debate about what the best model is," said Douglas Harris, an expert on value-added modeling at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved in the design of New York's statistical formula.
