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How one man changed the way we evaluate teachers

Statistician William S. Sanders established the foundation of how we track teacher performance in the U.S. today.

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Statistician William S. Sanders established the foundation of how we track teacher performance in the U.S. today. Sanders, who died earlier this year, revolutionized national education policy in 1982 when he wrote a letter to the governor of Tennessee offering to apply statistical methods to students' standardized test scores to help assess teachers. Today, we know his technique as the value-added method of tracking teacher performance. (The New York Times)

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