Value Added Modeling in Teacher Evaluation: A Case Study in Economic Imperialism?

• In Event: 548 - Theory Section Paper Session. Theorizing the Social: Studies of Science and Technology

Abstract

‘Value Added Modeling’ (VAM) is a statistical technology for evaluating the effectiveness of schoolteachers. The idea is to employ a model that uses students’ past test scores to predict their future scores, controlling for socioeconomic status and school context. A teacher’s effectiveness is inferred by comparing students’ actual and predicted scores. While there is extreme controversy within academia surrounding the statistical validity and reliability of VAM, this has not stopped some policymakers from implementing the models to evaluate teachers in both high and low-stakes capacities. This paper traces the history of VAMs as controversial statistical objects. While the concept of measuring teacher quality of ‘Value Added’ comes from economists’ research in the 1960s on ‘education production functions,’ the more contested use of VAM to assess individual teachers was instigated much later by a little-known Tennessee biostatistician. While in the 1990s VAM was a controversial technology promoted by right-wing think tanks, a revival of interest in VAMs by economists has once again legitimated the models as a topic of inquiry for mainstream economic research. The history of VAM is thus an interesting case in which the politicization of a statistical object was not just another case of economics imperialism, but was actually driven by research from outside the scope of mainstream economics. This has consequences for both how we understand the role of economists in policy domains, as well as how scientific controversy is managed.

Authors

• Zachary Webster Griffen, University of California-Los Angeles

• Aaron Panofsky, University of California-Los Angeles