2016-03-18

Nate Silver: Wrong on VAM

I like Nate Silver's FiveThiryEight site very much, and I think that its political coverage is very insightful. However, I could do without a lot of the site's pop-culture, sports, etc. filler. Another thing that they're wildly off-base about: they seem to be highly pro-VAM -- that's the Value-Added Metric, the reputed way of assessing teachers by student test scores -- which has been roundly shown to be a disastrously wrong (effectively random) metric in any serious study that I've seen, but about which 538 is super-supportive (for reasons that seem incoherent to me). Here's a very good outline of the critique:

1 comment:

  1. Agree or disagree with them, but it would be hard to suggest that Raj Chetty, Tom Kane, etc. aren't doing "serious" studies.

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