How Can Value-Added Measures Be Used for Teacher Improvement?

Highlights: Value-added measures are not a good source of information for helping teachers improve because they provide little information on effective and actionable practices. School, district, and state leaders may be able to improve teaching by using value-added to shape decisions about programs, human resources, and incentives. Value-added measures of improvement are more precise measures for groups of teachers than they are for individual teachers, thus they may provide useful information on improvement associated with practices, programs or schools. Many incentive programs for staff performance that are based on student performance have not shown benefits. Research points to the difficulty of designing these programs well and maintaining them politically. Value-added measures for selecting and improving programs, for informing human resource decisions, and for incentives are likely to be more useful when they are combined with other measures. We still have only a limited understanding of how best to use value-added measures in combination with other measures as tools for improvement.