Chilling
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water...so goes the old JAWS promo. I thought the water for teachers would be a little safer when the Bush administration packed it in. First came Obama's "Race to the Top," (why must it always be a competition with winners and losers?) and then this bizarre notion of "value added" teachers from an article in the L. A. Times. Now you know by the sound of that phrase the business model applied to public education is alive and well. A small amount of research leads you to this wonderful paragraph from the Rand Corporation's study linking achievement tests to teacher "performance." (Hey, we're not trainin' seals heah!") What Is a Teacher Effect? Applications of VAM often model growth or gain scores as a means of measuring the effects of incremental inputs on incremental out- come—as the definition of value-added suggests (Hanushek, 1979).2 Appropriate interpretation of VAM results re