VAM Is Overly Simplistic

Two Organizations Warn That the Use of VAM Is Overly Simplistic

In a previous blog I wrote about the comments of the Educational Testing Service and its inclusion of eight factors of student learning that are beyond the control of public schools.  There are also two organizations, The American Educational Research Association (AERA) and the National Academy of Education (NAE) joined together to share concerns about those same factors that make assigning student growth to an individual teacher; which include class size, curriculum materials, instruction time, of specialists and tutors, home or community support, the needs and abilities, health and attendance of individual students, peer culture and achievement, prior teachers and schooling, differential summer learning loss (which hits low-income children most),

There are many factors for which we can not account.  The essay writing skills a student learns from his/her history teacher may be assigned to the student’s English teacher; or the math skills the student learns in her/his physics class may be assigned to the math teacher.  Skills taught be previous teachers may not be tested until later; some students may receive outside tutoring or help from well educated parents; some schools may have well resourced specialists that other schools do not.  Therefore, the concept that we can isolate the effects of one teacher, according to the AERA-NAE statement, is overly simplistic.