Educational Accountability, Value-Added Modeling, and the Origin of the Achievement Gap

Empirical results are consistent with the hypothesis that socioeconomic factors contribute to initial disparities in performance that are perpetuated by demoralizing grading, testing, and grouping practices throughout the K-12 years. The hypothesis may explain why the achievement gap increases after children enter the school system, why Black students lose ground within schools and within classrooms, why value-added modeling (VAM) estimates of teacher performance are unstable from year to year, why Rothstein found that VAM estimates of teacher performance predict prior student performance, why VAM estimates of teacher performance predict gains in student achievement, and why persistent sorting may account for the Gates Foundation’s Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) results despite random assignment of class rosters to teachers.

Essays in applied economics

This dissertation examines several themes in applied economics. Specifically, Essay 1 examines the dynamics in an overlapping generations model with three-period lived agents, fiat money, and credit, Essay 2 reviews literature on value-added modeling and discusses a paper previously published, Essay 3 concludes by examining efficiency in the US bond market. While Essay 1 examines dynamics and 2 reviews tools used in estimating panel data, Essay 3 combines elements of both-empirically evaluating the efficiency of the bond market by looking at the movement of prices through time. That is, deriving the integral over t of the bond spread. While opportunities for more work exists, this paper suggests that the US Bond Market (the market for corporate debt) is informationally efficient, though it takes longer to converge than previously reported in the literature.

The “power” of value-added thinking: Exploring the implementation of high-stakes teacher accountability policies in Rio de Janeiro

The purpose of this article is to ethnographically document the market-based ideological assumptions of Rio de Janeiro’s educational policymakers, and the ways in which those assumptions have informed these policymakers’ decision to implement value-added modeling-based teacher evaluation policies. Drawing on the anthropological literature on meaning making (Anderson-Levitt, 2012), the focus of this study is on the common understandings and ideological assumptions regarding “good” teacher education practice that undergird the policymaking decisions of Rio de Janeiro’s public education policymakers. On the basis of ethnographic interviews, I argue that the then-current Secretariat of Education in Rio was run primarily by people whose backgrounds in business and administration heavily influenced their ideological assumptions about good educational management. I further explore the ways in which Rio’s implementation of value-added modeling and high-stakes accountability-based teacher evaluation mechanisms reflects these latent ideological trends.

Value-Added Modeling and Educational Accountability

Value-added estimates of teacher or school quality are increasingly used for both high- and low-stakes accountability purposes, making understanding of their limitations critical. A review of the recent value-added literature suggests three concerns with the state of the research. First, the issues receiving the most research attention have not always been the concerns of greatest importance to theorists or critics. Second, there has been insufficient research on the interactions among various issues or assumption violations. Third, some of the big issues in value-added modeling have been challenging to address and may require educators to step back and answer some underlying philosophical questions about the nature of teacher and school quality.