The Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System (TVAAS) allows teachers to evaluate students relative to their peers as well as to the student’s own academic growth year over year. This system is helpful because it provides context for where all the students at a particular grade level are and it also provides context for where the individual student is in terms of personal development. What I like about the TVAAS is that it recognizes that one test or assessment should not be used to determine where kids are at in terms of their academic level. What I do not like about this assessment is that still compares students to one another to determine where students are at in relation to their peers. I do not feel that this is a good method of determining value in terms of where a student is academically speaking. It is a method used for ranking students based on scores and achievement, but that is all. It should not be used to determine whether one is a good student or not. Likewise, the assessment should not be used to determine whether the teacher is a good teacher or not. Not every teacher is going to have the same kind of impact on every student, and that is not something that can really be controlled. So much of it comes down to learning style, teaching approach, personality, and external factors such as what the student is going through at home as well as internal factors that people may not be aware of such as changes in the student’s body or learning disabilities that have not been identified because they have not been made prominent before during other years of learning. The benefits of the TVAAS I feel are instrumental in moving student assessment systems in the right direction. The idea that every student should be held to the same standard and rigor is one that is adopted in Asian cultures, but in the West we have more of an individualized approach to education. This means that students can be measured in terms of their own individual pace and where they were prior to the year of academic learning that has passed. That is one of the good things about the TVAAS—it looks at the individual achievement of the student and not...

The standards that are adopted by other states and used in approaches such as Common Core or No Child Left Behind before that are not applicable for the TVAAS. The standard is not viewed as a measure or rule that all students should meet.
Still, what bothers me about assessments in general is that they can still be used to gauge the effectiveness of the teacher. For instance, why is student achievement a measure of teacher adequacy? The student assessment should be a measure of student achievement and that is all. Teacher adequacy should be determined before the teacher is hired and through observation. Teachers are simply not capable of causing improvements in every student under their care because they do not have total control over every student. In fact, the teacher makes up a very small part of the inputs that go into a student’s achievement. The teacher is a facilitator of learning but not the ultimate input. The student has to take ownership of his or her education and so if a student does not do so it can reflect poorly on the teacher. That is what I find to be unfair. Teachers should be assessed on things that they can actually control—such as whether they are using good tools for teaching or diversifying their teaching approach to appeal to as many different learning styles as possible. Teachers are not actually in control of student output, though it might appear that way to some who look at student academic growth over the course of a year and think it reflects on the teacher’s adequacy or value.

That is the drawback of the TVAAS for me. Teachers who are worried about their TVAAS score will start doing the same thing that teachers who were trying to teach for the test were doing under No Child Left Behind in order to get everyone to same level so that they could secure funds from the state. Teachers will want to show that their students are improving year over year so they will teach just to show that—but that should not be their primary objective because ultimately it is all about them. They…