Abstract

FOR some time now, I've contended that the Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System (TVAAS) is circular: TVAAS defines teachers as those who produce increases in test scores. Then it says, look here, when kids are in the classes of effective teachers, their test scores go up. I've also wondered about the value of a system - any system - that is judged by producing increases in scores on norm-referenced achievement tests. (TVAAS originally used off-the-shelf CTBS items.) Now comes Haggai Kupermintz of the University of Haifa who makes these same observations and raises many important questions about the use of TVAAS. Kupermintz asks his questions in the Fall 2003 issue of Evaluation and Policy Analysis. As for the circularity, Kupermintz notes that most interpretations of TVAAS are causal: the differences in teacher produce the changes in test scores. He goes on: Unfortunately, such causal interpretation is faulty because teacher is defined and measured by the magnitude of student gains. In other words, differences in student learning determine - by definition - teacher effectiveness: a teacher whose students achieve larger gains is the effective teacher. TVAAS divides teachers into five effectiveness groups according to their ranking among peers in terms of average student gains. To turn full circle and claim that teacher is the cause of student score gains is at best a necessary, trivial truth similar to the observation that bachelors are unmarried. (Emphases in the original.) Early in his article, Kupermintz provides an example from William Sanders, principal inventor of the TVAAS system.1 It is clear from the [procedure that Sanders uses] that each individual teacher estimate depends on the performance of all other teachers in the system. In other words, TVAAS teacher are norm-referenced measures that rank teachers within each school system. Criterion-referenced interpretations of teacher or comparisons of teacher scores across systems are unwarranted. (System here means district; Tennessee refers to its districts as systems.) This, in turn, means that a weak teacher in a weak system would receive a more favorable rating than that same teacher in a strong system. Tennessee systems, Kupermintz notes, vary widely in their value-added measures. This would be true, of course, of most any state. Moreover, TVAAS presents teacher as if they are independent, additive, and linear. That is, its model of teachers envisions a person isolated in her classroom with zero contact with or impact from the rest of the world. This representation of a teacher's ecosphere has, at best, limited utility. Educational communities that value collaborations, team teaching, interdisciplinary curricula, and promote student autonomy and active participation in educational decisions may find little use for such information, Kupermintz writes. Kupermintz then gives an example of a science teacher and a math teacher who collaborate in a computer-rich environment to improve both math and science knowledge and understanding in students. He concludes, Attempts to disentangle such complex, interwoven contributions of the science teacher, the math teacher, and the computerized learning environment into isolated independent effects are not only methodologically intractable but conceptually misguided. Teaching and learning are aspects of a synergistic phenomenon whereby dynamic forces interact to produce accumulating changes in student knowledge structures, a repertoire of problem solving strategies, metacognitive capacity, as well as attitudes, affects, and volition. Teacher evaluation, says Kupermintz, has to take all of these into account. A problem with the TVAAS that might be of most concern to urban districts has to do with how it treats teachers with missing student test data. …

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