Ongoing or recently completed across the United States are a series of lawsuits via which teacher plaintiffs are contesting how they are being evaluated using value-added models (VAMs) as part of states'/districts' teacher accountability systems. To investigate the empirical and pragmatic matters addressed in court, researchers conducted a case…

Recent lawsuits reveal common mistakes plaguing current teacher evaluation systems. Drawing on arguments in court documents for prominent cases, the authors find that evaluation systems using value-added measures (VAM) suffer from a) inconsistent and unreliable teacher ratings, b) bias toward and against teachers of certain types of students, c)…

Contemporary teacher evaluation systems are built upon multiple measures including, primarily, teacher-level value-added and observational estimates. While researchers have conducted examinations of these systems and indicators, researchers have not investigated how using these systems might distort the validity of the inferences being drawn,…

Being an expert involves explaining how things are supposed to work, and, perhaps more important, why things might not work as supposed. In this study, researchers surveyed scholars with expertise in value-added models (VAMs) to solicit their opinions about the uses and potential of VAMs for teacher-level accountability purposes (for example, in…