RAND Corporation2003
RAND-Education is the source of this Carnegie-funded 160-page monograph by Daniel F. McCaffrey, J.R. Lockwood, Daniel M. Koretz and Laura S. Hamilton. Given today's keen interest in value-added evaluations of teachers and schools, you'll want to know about it, even though it's boring and academic and concludes that more research is needed. Still, it does a nice job of setting forth possible sources of error in value-added teacher evaluations and analyzing well-known methods for doing this (including the celebrated methodology of Bill Sanders). In the end, sounding like a (juiceless) version of Churchill discussing democracy, the authors conclude that, notwithstanding the many perils of value-added analysis, it may be no worse than "other methods for using test scores to evaluate schools or teachers" and might even "provide less-biased and more-precise assessments of teacher effects." See for yourself at http://www.rand.org/publications/MG/MG158/.
