Aaron Panofsky, associate professor of public policy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, has been named the 2014-15 Kenneth L. Sokoloff Fellow at the UCLA Center for American Politics and Public Policy (CAPPP). The award comes with a grant to support the hiring of a research assistant.
The CAPPP Faculty Research Fellows program is intended to support ladder faculty initiate, conduct or complete research on U.S. political and policy processes and institutions. The fellowship is named in honor of the late Kenneth Sokoloff, a renowned economic historian on UCLA's faculty.
Panofsky will conduct research on Value Added Modeling (VAM), an emerging technique for evaluating the quality of teacher performance in terms of helping students improve their test scores.
“VAM is controversial in the social scientific community – there is disagreement whether it can effectively distinguish better and worse teachers – yet it is being implemented in many states for personnel decisions,” Panofsky wrote in a description of his research. “My project aims to talk to the experts to learn their different understandings of VAM and the controversy surrounding it, and then to look at how the controversy is affecting VAM’s implementation.”
