Tore Bernt Sørensen is a PhD student currently studying at the University of Bristol in England, he is an emerging global educational policy scholar, and he is a future colleague whom I am to meet this summer during an internationally-situated talk on VAMs. Just last week he released a paper published by Education International (Belgium) in which he discusses VAMs, and their use(s) globally. It is rare that I read or have the opportunities to write about what is happening with VAMs worldwide; hence, I am taking this opportunity to share with you all some of the global highlights from his article. I have also attached his article to this post here for those of you who want to give the full document a thorough read (see also the article’s full reference below).
First is that the US is “leading” the world in terms of its adoption of VAMs as an educational policy tool. While I did know this prior given my prior attempts to explore what was happening in the universe of VAMs outside of the US, as per Sørensen, our nation’s ranking in this case is still in place. In fact, “in the US the use of VAM as a policy instrument to evaluate schools and teachers has been taken exceptionally far [emphasis added] in the last 5 years, [while] most other high-income countries remain [relatively more] cautious towards the use of VAM;” this, “as reflected in OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] reports on the [VAM] policy instrument” (p. 1).
The second country most exceptionally using VAMs, so far, is England. Their national school inspection system in England, run by England’s Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (OFSTED), for example, now has VAM as its central standard and accountability indicator.
These two nations are the most invested in VAMs, thus far, primarily because they have similar histories with the school effectiveness movement that emerged in the 1970s. In addition, both countries are also both highly engaged in what Pasi Sahlberg in his 2011 book Finnish Lessons termed the Global Educational Reform Movement (GERM). GERM, in place since the 1980s, has “radically altered education sectors throughout the world with an agenda of evidence-based policy based on the [same] school effectiveness paradigm…[as it]…combines the centralised formulation of objectives and standards, and [the] monitoring of data, with the decentralisation to schools concerning decisions around how they seek to meet standards and maximise performance in their day-to-day running” (p. 5).
“The Chilean education system has [also recently] been subject to one of the more radical variants of GERM and there is [now] an interest [also there] in calculating VAM scores for teachers” (p. 6). In Denmark and Sweden state authorities have begun to compare predicted versus actual performance of schools, not teachers, while taking into consideration “the contextual factors of parents’ educational background, gender, and student origin” (i.e, “context value added”) (p. 7). In Uganda and Delhi, in “partnership” with an England based, international school development company ARK, they are looking to gear up their data systems so they can run VAM trials and analyses to assess their schools’ effects, and also likely continue to scale up and out.
The US-based World Bank is also backing such international moves, as is the US-based Pearson testing corporation via its Learning Curve Project, which is relying on the input from some of the most prominent VAM advocates including Eric Hanushek (see prior posts on Hanushek here and here) and Raj Chetty (see prior posts on Chetty here and here) to promote itself as a player in the universe of VAMs. This makes sense, “[c]onsidering Pearson’s aspirations to be a global education company… particularly in low-income countries” (p. 7). On that note, also as per Sørensen, “education systems in low-income countries might prove [most] vulnerable in the coming years as international donors and for-profit enterprises appear to be endorsing VAM as a means to raise school and teacher quality” in such educationally struggling nations (p. 2).
See also a related blog post about Sørensen’s piece here, as written by him on the Education in Crisis blog, which is also sponsored by Education International. In this piece he also discusses the use of data for political purposes, as is too often the case with VAMs when “the use of statistical tools as policy instruments is taken too far…towards bounded rationality in education policy.”
In short, “VAM, if it has any use at all, must expose the misleading use of statistical mumbo jumbo that effectively #VAMboozles [thanks for the shout out!!] teachers, schools and society. This could help to spark some much needed reflection on the basic propositions of school effectiveness, the negative effects of putting too much trust in numbers, and lead us to start holding policy-makers to account for their misuse of data in policy formation.
Reference: Sørensen, T. B. (2016). Value-added measurement or modelling (VAM). Brussels, Belgium: Education International. Retrieved from http://download.ei-ie.org/Docs/WebDepot/2016_EI_VAM_EN_final_Web.pdf
