The Value Deming's Ideas Can Add to Educational Evaluation

Abstract Value-added models are being implemented in many states in an attempt to measure the contributions of individual teachers and schools toward students' learning. Scores from these models are increasingly used for high-stakes purposes such as selecting teachers to receive merit pay increases, determining which teachers are to be fired, closing schools, and allocating money to programs. The statistician W. Edwards Deming wrote extensively about improving quality in education and the damage caused by performance rankings. In this paper, Deming's writings are related to uses of value-added models in the United States. Some of the models used for value-added assessment are reviewed and assessed. A simulation study based on Deming's red bead experiment shows the effects of strategies teachers and schools might adopt to raise their value-added scores without changing their teaching