Reassessing school effectiveness: Multi-objective value-added measures (MOVAM) of academic and socioemotional learning

Under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), it is imperative that American public schools assess and improve not only academic but also non-academic measures of student learning such as socioemotional skills. The policy shift towards broad-based school accountability calls for reassessing school effectiveness from whole child development perspectives and addressing potential biases and limitations of conventional value-added measures (VAM). Through multivariate multilevel analyses of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kintergarten (ECLS-K): 2011 data, this study applies multi-objective value-added measures (MOVAM) approach to assess and improve school effectiveness for academic and socioemotional learning. The study results show different patterns of academic vs. socioemotional learning gains, and also weak correlations between school effects on the two types of learning outcomes. Nevertheless, the comparisons of academically and socioemotionally effective vs. ineffective schools imply that schools can and should improve both academic and socioemotional learning outcomes through synergistic improvement of key organizational and instructional conditions.