Charleston’s plan for teachers won’t work

Charleston County School District is set to apply value-added methods (VAM) for evaluating teachers, which includes holding teachers accountable for student test outcomes. In an opinion piece published in The Post and Courier, Furman University Education professor Paul Thomas says VAM is rife with false assumptions. He suggests another approach saying, “The students and community would be better served by making sure we know what the teacher quality problems are and then seeking ways to address those instead of choosing political expediency and wasting tax dollars on policies and programs already shown to fail.”