Ambivalent economizations: the case of value added modeling in teacher evaluation
- PDF / 482,601 Bytes
- 25 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 67 Downloads / 162 Views
Ambivalent economizations: the case of value added modeling in teacher evaluation Zachary Griffen 1 & Aaron Panofsky 2 Accepted: 7 April 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Research on economization processes is increasingly taking seriously the social and material processes through which various policy domains are transformed into economic problems and solutions. This article engages “Value Added Modeling” (VAM) in teacher evaluation systems as a case study in economization. VAM is a statistical technology for evaluating the effectiveness of schoolteachers using student test scores, which wrests authority for the determination of quality teaching away from education professionals and toward quantitative economic modelers. Mobilizing field theory, we trace a half century of changing relationships among economists, other academics, and various policy audiences (from media to philanthropists to state and federal government) in struggles to define education policy concerning teacher quality. We show that economization is a set of overlapping, sometimes contradictory processes that can take different forms: in this case, the spread of an “economic style of reasoning” or the establishment of “economic policy devices.” The case of VAM shows stages of economization in which processes first proceeded independently of one another, then interacted in contradictory ways, and finally, mutually reinforced one another. What primarily drove these interactions was the struggle for scientific capital within the economics discipline and the changing place of education policy and VAM within it. Ultimately, VAM’s original role as a policy device for evaluating and selecting individual teachers has foundered even as it has become an important tool for economists to accrue scientific capital and expand their style of reasoning to broader audiences. Keywords Economics . Education policy . Expertise . Field theory . History of American
education . Quantification . Think tanks
* Zachary Griffen [email protected] Aaron Panofsky [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
Theory and Society
In 2010, a teacher in the Houston Independent School District was named “Teacher of the Year” by her colleagues. The next year, she was fired for poor performance. A few years later, a veteran New York teacher who had received numerous accolades from her peers and her district was embroiled in a lawsuit against the state, which had issued her a subpar ranking for the 2013–204 school year. Meanwhile, across the country, a group of California students backed by a wealthy entrepreneur went to court to contest the state’s teacher tenure laws. In 2014, the judge’s initial decision in the Vergara v California case vacated tenure rights based on the claim that “there are a significant number of grossly ineffective teachers currently active in California classrooms” (Treu 2014, p. 8). Prior to this lawsuit, the Los Angeles Times had been publishing an annual list ranking the effectiveness of every t
Data Loading...
