Neither Fair Nor Accurate

Sadly the author is just defending teachers' unions without proposing anything better.

There's good evidence that value-added modeling works. Half the problems noted in the link are addressed directly by the modeling (the author is ignorant or misleading) and the other half of the problems noted aren't actually problems (the data being noisy, for instance, is not a real problem).

> On the surface, the logic of VAM and using student scores to evaluate teachers seems like common sense: The more effective a teacher, the better his or her students should do on standardized tests.

Au contraire, the logic of VAM is that the more effective a teacher, the more GAINS a student should make, year-over-year. The actual performance level of a student is unimportant and is factored out. That the author doesn't even grasp this point suggests that his criticism is not based on a particularly good understanding.