Last week I attended a half day symposium on the policy implications of value added measures for school improvement convened by the Urban Institute’s Center for the Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research.  Whew… Doesn’t sound like a topic that would inspire much passion or a whole lot of interest? But lo and behold the meeting room was jammed and the audience of Washington policy types and ed researchers was captivated. What’s going on here? Well, the reauthorization of ESEA has stirred a huge debate about reliable, valid and fair ways to determine whether schools are making adequately yearly progress towards the goal of 100% proficiency in 2014.  The value added concept is in the thick of the debate.  Can and should student progress be some how combined with student achievement to determine the rewards and sanctions for schools?  At this gathering the answer was a compelling “yes”. The researchers and the policy analysts on the symposium’s panels spoke mostly of the virtues of value added models.

But some of us in the audience were feeling uneasy. From a policy point of view value added measures make a whole lot of sense. But measuring progress for individual students over time is an exceedingly complex and difficult undertaking as several researchers demonstrated.  My head was spinning after listening to several researchers discuss various value added models.  And my mind wandered back to the universal health care proposal during the early years of the Clinton Administration. Great goals, sound policy, and … overwhelmingly complex.  Is value added modeling another case of good policy that just might not be implementable within the limited capacities of state and local educational agencies?  To me building the capacity to change is just as important as creating policy to trigger change.