VAM on trial: judging science in teacher evaluation lawsuits

Value Added Modeling (VAM) is a statistical technology used to evaluate teacher effectiveness. While it was heralded for years as the next big innovation in education reform, VAM has become an object of legal scrutiny since it was implemented in dozens of states across the U.S. Building on STS findings about science and the law, this paper considers the lawsuits involving VAM as an opportunity to analyze the contestation of expertise in court. It finds that not only is there a great deal of variation in terms of how expertise gets constructed in legal settings, leading to very different outcomes, but also that judges’ assessments of VAM are conducted such that they are implicitly adjudicating what constitutes proper science. Contrary to the idea that judges conform to criteria for evaluating expertise imposed by the scientific community limiting themselves to the inclusion or exclusion of expertise, in the case of VAM the legal system is asserting its own vision of how science should operate and thus making judgments about what counts authentically as science.