William Sanders (statistician)
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Dr. William L. Sanders is a senior research fellow with the University of North Carolina system and is manager of value-added assessment and research for SAS Institute Inc. in Cary, N.C.
He developed the Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System, also known as the Educational Value-Added Assessment System, a method for measuring a teacher's effect on student performance by tracking the progress of students against themselves over the course of their school career with their assignment to various teachers' classes. This system has been used in Tennessee since 1993, and has been adopted by a number of other school districts across the USA. Sanders' approach is used to support the theory that the quality of teachers is central to educational achievement.[1]
He assumed the SAS position in June of 2000, upon retiring after more than 34 years as professor and director of the University of Tennessee's Value-Added Research and Assessment Center.
Sanders has served as an advisor to policy makers at the federal level; he has worked with many states and districts interested in developing a value-added component to leverage their testing data into more precise and reliable information for better decision making. Many of his suggestions concerning measurement of outcome were incorporated into Tennessee's Educational Improvement Act (1992) and more recently in legislation creating pilots in Colorado and in a statewide accountability program in Ohio. Pennsylvania and New Hampshire Departments of Education sponsor pilots, and the Iowa School Board Association sponsors his value-added work in that state. Battelle for Kids funds the SAS EVAAS services for the participating districts in Ohio.
Over the last twenty years, Sanders and his colleagues have developed and refined a methodology to measure the influence that school systems, schools and teachers have on the academic progress of students. By following the academic progress of each student over time and using statistical mixed-model techniques, Sanders has demonstrated that both accelerators and impediments to sustained academic growth can be measured in a fair, objective and unbiased manner. His value-added approach to assessment provides crucial diagnostic information for principals and teachers and can also be used as the basis for district or state accountability models.
To accommodate the technical requirements of a mixed-model application of the scope of SAS EVAAS, Sanders and his colleagues have developed a software system capable of solving thousands of equations iteratively. This complex system enables a massive multivariate, longitudinal analysis using all achievement data for each student, even those with incomplete testing histories, to estimate the effects of teachers, schools and school systems. The development of this software has allowed the inherent advantages of longitudinal analyses to be extended to a statewide application, previously unavailable from commercial software. Compared to simpler approaches to educational value-added assessment, the SAS EVAAS system offers a number of advantages.
Sanders was the Jason Millman Memorial Lecturer at the National Evaluation Institute in San Jose, Calif. (July 2000). He received his bachelor's degree and doctorate from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
