"Value added": A concept to assess and evaluate public education...

In the business world, "value added" is a critical leadership concept.  It basically means that every input in the process should "add value" to the outcome.  Any input failing to add value should be eliminated.  This includes personnel and jobs.

The leadership challenge, of course, is how best to assess and evaluate value added.  With objects, careful measurement against a pre-determined standard provides a helpful method for assessment.  But, how best to determine the value that human beings add to the process is far more difficult.

In a study tracking 2.5M students over 20 years, Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff used the concept of value added to evaluate the difference between excellent teachers, average teachers, and poor teachers had upon their students.  Analyzing the differences between students' beginning test scores and the scores after 1 year of instruction and controlling for critical variables, including as wealth, the researchers eliminated most sources of uncertainty.

Their findings:

• A student with 1 excellent teacher for 1 year between fourth and eighth grade increases liftetime income by $4.6k.
• Replacing 1 poor teacher with 1 average teacher raises a single classroom's lifetime earnings by about $266k for each year of teaching.
• 1 low value-added teacher in a classroom for 10 years results in ~$2.5M in lost income for this teacher's students, compared to an average teacher.

Beyond the economic advantages, the reserarchers discovered other value-added benefits:

• Students with excellent teachers have lower rates of teenage pregnancy.
• When students have excellent teachers during their elementary and middle school years, they are more likely to enroll in college.

It likely won't be long before the public school teachers' union leaders come forward to rail against the concept of value added being used to evaluate teachers and deny the value of this study.  But, The Motley Monk would observe, the concept does provide a sound method for public school boards to assess and evaluate all of those other cogs in the public education bureaucracy.


Let the discussion begin...



To read the Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff  study, click on the following link:
http://obs.rc.fas.harvard.edu/chetty/value_added.html