Jacks Family Professor of Education, Emeritus
Functions of test scores in discourse about education; how testing shapes ideas of success and failure for students, schools, and public education as a whole.
Dr. Haertel is an expert in the area of educational testing and assessment. His research and teaching focus on psychometrics and educational policy, especially test-based accountability and related policy uses of test data. His recent work has examined standard setting methods, limitations of value-added models for teacher and school accountability, impacts of testing on curriculum, students, and educational policy, test reliability, and generalizability theory.
"It is not hard to understand why accountability testing is popular with policy makers. Testing enjoys broad popular support. Calling for more or higher-stakes testing is a visible, dramatic response to public concerns about education. Moreover, the idea that demanding higher test scores will improve schooling carries with it the not-too-subtle implication that students, teachers, and administrators just aren't trying hard enough."
- from his article, "Performance Assessment and Education Reform"
Since 1980.
Assistant Professor of Education (1980 - 1987);
Associate Professor of Education (1987 - 1992);
Professor of Education (1992 - 2008);
Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs (2005 - 2010);
Jacks Family Professor of Education (2008 - 2012);
Jacks Family Professor of Education, Emeritus (2013- )
Assistant Professor, University of Illinois, Chicago (1979-1980)
Introduction to Test Theory (Ed 252)
“Fairness Using Derived Scores” (in-press, with A. Ho)
"Selection of Common Items as an Unrecognized Source of Variability in Test Equating” (2014, with M. Michaelides)
Reliability and Validity of Inferences About Teachers Based on Student Test Scores (14th Angoff Memorial Lecture, 2013, see https://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/PICANG14.pdf)
“Evaluating Teacher Evaluation” in Phi Delta Kappan (2012, with L. Darling-Hammond, A. Amrein-Beardsley, and J. Rothstein);
“The Briefing Book Method” in G. Cizek (Ed.), Setting Performance Standards (2012, with J. Beimers and J. Miles);
The Effect of Ignoring Classroom-level Variance in Estimating the Generalizability of School Mean Scores” in Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice (2011, with X. Wei);
Problems with the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers (2010, EPI policy brief , one of ten authors, listed alphabetically, available at http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/bp278)
Gaining Ground in the Middle Grades: Why Some Schools Do Better (2010, co-authored with Trish Williams and Michael Kirst, available at Available at http://www.edsource.org/middle-grades-study.html)
Member, State of California Advisory Committee for the Public Schools Accountability Act of 1999; Member, Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium Technical Advisory Committee