Elias Walsh specializes in education policy, with a focus on the design and evaluation of value-added measures of educator effectiveness.
Walsh has provided technical assistance to states and districts on developing value-added models to measure teacher and school effectiveness. Currently, he provides support to the Oklahoma State Department of Education on developing value-added measures of educator effectiveness for its educator evaluation system. He has also developed value-added models and examined the relationships between value added and other educator evaluation components for the District of Columbia (DC) and the state of Pennsylvania. He led Mathematica’s effort to evaluate the impact of school reform in DC with the DC Education Consortium for Research and Evaluation. In addition, he directed an investigation of the impact of new principals on student achievement in DC. Walsh has also co-authored many Mathematica reports and working papers, including methodological papers on value-added models.
Before joining Mathematica in 2011, Walsh was a Teach For America math teacher in the Chicago Public Schools. He is a reviewer for Educational Researcher and Economics of Education Review and holds a Ph.D. in economics and public policy from the University of Michigan.
The recent public statement by the American Educational Research Association (AERA) on the use of value-added measures has a lot of scary language about “scientific and technical limitations,” and lists requirements that they say value-added models should meet. But do these requirements represent the “very high technical bar” the AERA claims it is setting? We don’t think so.
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