My fellow Ed Week blogger Stephen Sawchuck highlights some interesting new research suggesting that student tracking in middle and high schools may create biases in value-added measures that make them weaker predictors teacher effectiveness in high school than in the elementary grades. I highlighted Kirabo Jackson, who conducted one of the studies, here last year.
Lots of important questions and issues here, which Stephen lays out. I’d simply add that this research underscores why it’s so important that our thinking about teacher evaluation and use of value-added measures not focus solely on teachers as the unit analysis, but must also include a child-focused lens that takes into account the experiences of individual children over time and the ways in which children and teachers are assigned to one another.