Remembering A Mathematician Who Invented A Divisive Way To Track Tennessee Teachers

The mathematician known for inventing a controversial way to measure teacher effectiveness has died at age 74. Even Bill Sanders' obituary tries to explain how TVAAS works.

Sanders boiled it down when WPLN visited him at his home in Columbia for a 2014 interview.

"The analogy is, you measure the effectiveness of teaching on the progress that students make, as opposed to some characteristic directly of the teacher," he said.

Sanders' statistic specialty was cattle — after all, he grew up on a dairy farm in Shelbyville. But he applied his predictive breeding formulas to classrooms to help show how much a teacher was helping a student, rather than relying on outright scores on a test.

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