The Promise of Value-Added Assessment
By Robert Holland

The year was 1994 and Deana Bishop had just received her first teacher Value-Added Assessment report from her principal at Sam Houston Elementary School in Maryville , Tennessee . There were numbers galore. They had something to do with the state's latest venture in school reform.

The report did come with wording attempting to explain the statistics but that was all the information Deana had. So the second-year teacher glanced at the document, didn't think much more about it, and just filed it away?as did many of her colleagues.

That young teacher never dreamed what a profound effect the value-added concept eventually would have on her teaching.

After a few more years of classroom experience, Bishop noticed that her “V” for Value-Added file folder was growing awfully thick, and so she decided to try to figure what those numbers meant. She looked into the work of Dr. William Sanders, who pioneered this assessment system when he was at the University of Tennessee, and she experienced surprise No. 1:

“I found a philosophy of education I completely agreed with,” said Deana. “Value-Added Assessment was just a way to measure a student's academic growth over a school year, regardless of the student's beginning achievement level,” Bishop noted. “To me, Value-Added Assessment gives measurable proof to the idea that all students can learn and be successful.”

She dug deeper by looking into what schools with excellent value-added marks were doing differently. She found that they were assessing students and then planning their curriculum and instruction to meet the students' individual needs, “not just blindly teaching the standards.

Deana Bishop then plunged into her dusty Value-Added file to see what patterns she could detect in her own teaching. That yielded surprise No. 2?indeed, she now says “what I discovered was life-changing.”

She found that her instruction and curriculum had been highly effective for low- and average-achieving students, but her highest-achieving students were not showing the growth during their time with her that they should. Feeling she had let them down, she vowed to change that.

To better meet the needs of all students, she concluded that she had to know who they were. Bishop incorporated more and better forms of assessment into her classroom so that she would know when certain students were ready to move on or when they needed varied approaches.

“To an outsider,” recalled Bishop, who now is her school's Technology Coordinator, “my classroom would have looked much more fragmented than before, but the reality was that I was trying to implement what Dr. Sanders' data had showed me. In my classroom you would see reading circles of various levels going on, multiple math assignments for different students, students working on projects and in cooperative groups, technology integrated into those daily assignments, but most importantly you would see instruction and curriculum being driven by the needs of my students.”

As a result, the value-added scores of her high achievers did improve markedly, as did the scores for all her students. Some other teachers have discovered that their lower-achieving students were the ones not making progress, and so they have adjusted accordingly. The point is, say advocates, that the value-added approach helps students of all levels, as individuals.

The Word is Spreading

The Value-Added Assessment has spread far beyond Tennessee . In 2003, the Ohio legislature approved a measure that will incorporate value-added principles in the state's school accountability system by 2007. A business-led reform coalition called Battelle for Kids launched a pilot project with forty-two Ohio school districts (which has now grown to 110 districts) and convinced state lawmakers of value-added's merit. Mike Nicholson, the Battelle project's Coordinator of Assessment and Analysis tells of a “well-heeled school district” that learned its lower math achievers were making distinctly less progress than the high achievers. The problem? With the best of intentions, the school system had been stretching a year's math curriculum over two years, in the belief it would serve the low achievers well. But value-added analysis showed that a limited curriculum was only exacerbating the achievement gap.

Battelle for Kids held a National Value-Added Conference in Ohio last year and more than 500 educators from seventeen states attended. Nicholson expects even greater numbers at the second conference October 17-18 in Columbus .

At the federal level, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings has invited states to consider “growth models”—another term for value-added—in measuring their schools' effectiveness. In California, Pacific Research Institute scholars Harold C. Dornan and Lance T. Izumi recently developed a proposed value-added component intended to help all students meet federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) targets. They argued that California 's targeting percentages of students within each school who attain proficiency encourages schools to focus year to year on those students closest to reaching the minimum benchmark.

“Most accountability models wrongly focus on current status,” they wrote. “Current status measures are concerned with how groups of students have performed at a single point in time, ignoring how much they have improved over a specific period of time.”

Some critics believe NCLB itself encourages that “snapshot” approach, and should be modified.

Research Based

Value-Added Assessment got its start in 1983 when Tennessee first ventured into legislated education reform by emphasizing basic skills and a version of merit pay for teachers. It was then that Bill Sanders and his colleagues at the University of Tennessee began independently exploring the feasibility of employing a statistical methodology to overcome real-world problems in using student achievement as an instrument of assessment—i.e., transient students, missing records, shifting teacher assignments, and the blurring of individual input with team teaching.

Drawing on volumes of student achievement data from Knox County , the Sanders team was able to detect measurable, consistent differences among teachers with regard to their effect on student performance. With effective teachers, students could make gains no matter what their ability or achievement levels were when they started.

When the State of Tennessee went into its second phase of results-oriented education reform, the assessment system produced by the Sanders team was ready. With the enactment of the Education Improvement Act in 1991, Tennessee Value-Added Assessment gained a key role in analyzing data on how public education was doing its primary job of raising student achievement. Teachers like Deana Bishop in Maryville began receiving their first value-added reports.

Now, each teacher receives a report card based on a sophisticated analysis of norm-referenced testing data showing the year-to-year progress of his or her students. Supervisors also receive these reports.

Research by Sanders and others establishes that good teaching matters. Unfortunately, poor teaching also has a profound impact. The researchers have found that students unfortunate enough to have a succession of poor teachers are virtually doomed to the education cellar. Three consecutive years of 1 st quintile (least effective) teachers in grades 3 to 5 yield math scores from the 35 th to 45 th percentile. Conversely, three straight years of 5 th quintile teachers result in scores at the 85 th to 95 th percentile. Put another way, students with three straight years of effective teachers had 60 percent greater achievement than those unfortunate enough to have a succession of ineffective teachers.

A Boost for Teachers

One of the nicest features of Value-Added Assessment is the boost it gives to teachers who do a superior job helping low-achieving students. Often these teachers labor in obscurity, their work unappreciated or even devalued by lack of public understanding of the difficult challenges they face. By focusing on gains, value-added analysis can identify good teachers who are successful with low achievers as well as poor teachers who permit high achievers to coast. Fair comparisons could help students at both the low and high ends of the achievement spectrum, while helping teachers, too.

In a larger perspective, Value-Added Assessment could revolutionize how teachers are trained, hired, evaluated, retrained, rewarded, or sometimes encouraged to find a different line of work. From California to Virginia , merit pay for teachers is an idea finally nearing the top of the reform agenda. Bonuses for measurable value added to a child's education could become standard operating policy someday.

The founder of the online Education Consumers Clearinghouse, John Stone, summarized the advantages of Value-Added Assessment this way: “The adoption of Sanders' Value-Added Assessment may be the single most important step a state can take to improve its schools, because it permits teachers, principals, and parents to see what's working and what isn't.”

That is what Deana Bishop discovered years ago, and a growing number of teachers each year are joining her in their praise for Value-Added Assessment.