Inside the Academy, an online educational historiography, models the innovative use of technology to transmit educational research beyond academia. This is done by chronicling the personal and professional journeys of highly esteemed educational researchers and scholars through video interviews. In this study, researchers conducted an in-depth qualitative analysis of twelve honorees’ interview data. Analyses revealed that Inside the Academy has the potential to function as an accessible, relevant, research dissemination platform by providing policymakers, practitioners, pre-service teachers, graduate students, and others increased access to open source information and expert knowledge about foundational and contemporary educational philosophies, salient policy issues, and research-based practices of utmost prevalence in America’s public school system, and beyond.

This research note investigates an unexplored feature of bias in value-added model (VAM) estimates—that which is associated with grade levels and subject areas. Findings contribute an alternative perspective regarding how we think about VAM-based bias and teacher classifications.

Despite the overwhelming and research-based concerns regarding value-added models (VAMs), VAM advocates, policymakers, and supporters continue to hold strong to VAMs’ purported, yet still largely theoretical strengths and potentials. Those advancing VAMs have, more or less, adopted and promoted a set of agreed-upon, albeit “heroic” set of assumptions, without independent, peer-reviewed research in support. These “heroic” assumptions transcend promotional, policy, media, and research-based pieces, but they have never been fully investigated, explicated, or made explicit as a set or whole. These assumptions, though often violated, are often ignored in order to promote VAM adoption and use, and also to sell for-profits’ and sometimes non-profits’ VAM-based systems to states and districts. The purpose of this study was to make obvious the assumptions that have been made within the VAM narrative and that, accordingly, have often been accepted without challenge. Ultimately, sources for this study included 470 distinctly different written pieces, from both traditional and non-traditional sources. The results of this analysis suggest that the preponderance of sources propagating unfounded assertions are fostering a sort of VAM echo chamber that seems impenetrable by even the most rigorous and trustworthy empirical evidence.

In this commentary, authors discuss the Houston Independent School District's (HISD) highest-stakes use of its contracted value-added system (i.e., the Education Value-Added Assessment System (EVAAS)) to reform and improve student learning and achievement throughout the district's schools. Authors situate their discussion within a related report on the recent release of Houston Superintendent's own evaluation scores. Authors also situate their discussion within the evidence, as per the recent release of the state's large-scale standardized test scores. Authors assert that, perhaps, attaching high-stakes consequences to teachers' value-added output in Houston is not working as intended.

In this commentary, we take a look at the response to an Arizona State University (ASU) course titled, “U.S. Race Theory and the Problem of Whiteness,” which sparked protests and death threats for the course’s professor. We examine the media’s reaction, as well as ASU’s quiet response to the controversy. We argue that ASU failed to use the national spotlight as a platform to shed light on racism in higher education.