As a leading organization in education analytics, VARC is a growing research center and is often looking for talented people. Click here to read more about careers at VARC.
ABOUT VARC
The Value-Added Research Center was founded in 2004 to pursue to the twin tasks of
- Conducting basic research to develop new and useful models of the productivity of schools, teachers, and administrators; and
- Working with school districts and states to disseminate these models and assess their real-world utility.
While continuing to concentrate on the development and implementation of value-added models, the Center has grown to include multiple research projects that concentrate on such diverse areas as:
- Enhancing data structures, data systems, and data quality to the point where it is useful for longitudinal analysis. This includes working with school administrators and vendors to examine the technical tools and human process used to collect, manage, analyze, and report information.
- Using value-added models to evaluate intervention strategies to determine their effectiveness.
- Creating a professional development curriculum to train districts and states how to use assessment data and compare and contrast the different uses for attainment and value-added outcome measures.
- Providing technical assistance to the developers of pay-for-performance educator compensation programs that use value-added models and indicators as a means of measuring teacher and administrator performance.
Housed in the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Value-Added Research Center is home to multiple on-going research projects, and is funded by grants from sources such as U.S. Department of Education IES/NCES, NSF, and the Joyce Foundation. Research partners include the Milwaukee Public School System, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, Chicago Public Schools, and Teacher Incentive Fund grant recipients.
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