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I recently re-read an article in full that is now 10 years old, or 10 years out, as published in 2004 and, as per the words of the authors, before VAM approaches were “widely adopted in formal state or district accountability systems.” Unfortunately, I consistently find it interesting, particularly in terms of the research on VAMs, to re-explore/re-discover what we actually knew 10 years ago about VAMs, as most of the time, this serves as a reminder of how things, most of the time, have not changed.

The article, “Models for Value-Added Modeling of Teacher Effects,” is authored by Daniel McCaffrey (Educational Testing Service [ETS] Scientist, and still a “big name” in VAM research), J. R. Lockwood (RAND Corporation Scientists),  Daniel Koretz (Professor at Harvard), Thomas Louis (Professor at Johns Hopkins), and Laura Hamilton (RAND Corporation Scientist).

At the point at which the authors wrote this article, besides the aforementioned data and data base issues, were issues with “multiple measures on the same student and multiple teachers instructing each student” as “[c]lass groupings of students change annually, and students are taught by a different teacher each year.” Authors, more specifically, questioned “whether VAM really does remove the effects of factors such as prior performance and [students’] socio-economic status, and thereby provide[s] a more accurate indicator of teacher effectiveness.”

The assertions they advanced, accordingly and as relevant to these questions, follow:

• Across different types of VAMs, given different types of approaches to control for some of the above (e.g., bias), teachers’ contribution to total variability in test scores (as per value-added gains) ranged from 3% to 20%. That is, teachers can realistically only be held accountable for 3% to 20% of the variance in test scores using VAMs, while the other 80% to 97% of the variance (stil) comes from influences outside of the teacher’s control. A similar statistic (i.e., 1% to 14%) was similarly and recently highlighted in the recent position statement on VAMs released by the American Statistical Association.
• Most VAMs focus exclusively on scores from standardized assessments, although I will take this one-step further now, noting that all VAMs now focus exclusively on large-scale standardized tests. This I evidenced in a recent paper I published here: Putting growth and value-added models on the map: A national overview).
• VAMs introduce bias when missing test scores are not missing completely at random. The missing at random assumption, however, runs across most VAMs because without it, data missingness would be pragmatically insolvable, especially “given the large proportion of missing data in many achievement databases and known differences between students with complete and incomplete test data.” The really only solution here is to use “implicit imputation of values for unobserved gains using the observed scores” which is “followed by estimation of teacher effect[s] using the means of both the imputed and observe gains [together].”
• Bias “[still] is one of the most difficult issues arising from the use of VAMs to estimate school or teacher effects…[and]…the inclusion of student level covariates is not necessarily the solution to [this] bias.” In other words, “Controlling for student-level covariates alone is not sufficient to remove the effects of [students’] background [or demographic] characteristics.” There is a reason why bias is still such a highly contested issue when it comes to VAMs (see a recent post about this here).
• All (or now most) commonly-used VAMs assume that teachers’ (and prior teachers’) effects persist undiminished over time. This assumption “is not empirically or theoretically justified,” either, yet it persists.

These authors’ overall conclusion, again from 10 years ago but one that in many ways still stands? VAMs “will often be too imprecise to support some of [its] desired inferences” and uses including, for example, making low- and high-stakes decisions about teacher effects as produced via VAMs. “[O]btaining sufficiently precise estimates of teacher effects to support ranking [and such decisions] is likely to [forever] be a challenge.”