VARC staff are participating in a series of webinars sponsored by the department of education to provide support for districts considering implementing performance incentive systems as part of Race to the Top, Teacher Incentive Fund, or local initiatives. Michael Christian will be presenting in the session on Structuring Your Alternative Compensation Program: Challenges and Opportunities (to register click here). Chris Thorn and Peter Witham are the hosts of a session on Anticipating the Data Quality Challenges in TIF: Delivering Student-Teacher Linkages and Managing and Presenting Complex Data (to register click here). Recorded webinars will also be available after the fact on the CECR web site.

Amy McIntosh, New York City Department of Education Chief Talant Officer, discusses VARC’s contribution to the district’s teacher data initiative (New York City Department of Education website).

The Racine [WI] Unified School Board on Monday approved a new partnership with the [Value-Added Research Center at the] University of Wisconsin-Madison that will allow the district to identify which specific schools and teachers advance student achievement (Racine Journal Times, 16 March, 2010).

VARC Job Candidate Talks

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.