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Value-added models seek to measure a teacher’s effect on their students’ achievement by predicting how students will score on an assessment. Teachers are then either rewarded or reprimanded based on the gap between the model’s expectation and the students’ actual scores.
Value-added Model Quotes in Weapons of Math Destruction
The Weapons of Math Destruction quotes below are all either spoken by Value-added Model or refer to Value-added Model. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 1: Bomb Parts
Quotes
The value-added model in Washington, D.C., schools […] evaluates teachers largely on the basis of students’ test scores, while ignoring how much the teachers engage the students, work on specific skills, deal with classroom management, or help students with personal and family problems. It’s overly simple, sacrificing accuracy and insight for efficiency. Yet from the administrators’ perspective it provides an effective tool to ferret out hundreds of apparently underperforming teachers, even at the risk of misreading some of them.
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Chapter 7: Sweating Bullets
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While its scores are meaningless, the impact of value-added modeling is pervasive and nefarious. “I’ve seen some great teachers convince themselves that they were mediocre at best based on those scores,” Clifford said. “It moved them away from the great lessons they used to teach, toward increasing test prep. To a young teacher, a poor value-added score is punishing, and a good one may lead to a false sense of accomplishment that has not been earned.”
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Value-added Model Term Timeline in Weapons of Math Destruction
The timeline below shows where the term Value-added Model appears in Weapons of Math Destruction. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 7: Sweating Bullets
...were being measured based on how much they were helping their students to improve, the value-added model being used to gauge success tried to predict what a student’s score would be and...
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...and school board officials still aren’t rejecting WMDs outright (or even recognizing that they’re unfair). Value-added modeling , Clifford grimly predicts, isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Like inhumane scheduling software at major...
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Conclusion
...by auditing their hidden algorithms and studying their biases and shortcomings. Unfair systems, like the value-added model used to score teachers, must be dispatched entirely. Rather than letting negative feedback loops slip...
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