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Research on teacher productivity, and recently developed accountability systems for teachers, rely on value-added models to estimate the impact of teachers on student performance.  The authors test many of the central assumptions required to derive value-added models from an underlying structural cumulative achievement model and reject nearly all of them.  Moreover, they find that  teacher value added and other key parameter estimates are highly sensitive to model specification.  While estimates from commonly employed value-added models cannot be interpreted as causal teacher effects, employing richer models that impose fewer restrictions may reduce  the  bias in estimates of teacher productivity.  

This report describes a symposium conducted by New York State Education Department on September 13, 2011 in the Huxley Museum Theater at the Cultural Education Center in Albany.  It includes a paper prepared by the State Education Department on fiscal challenges facing school districts, presentations by education researchers Marguerite Roza and Stephen Frank about rethinking education resource use for greater student achievement and a summary of the session.