Understanding and evaluating the SAS® EVAAS® Univariate Response Model (URM) for measuring teacher effectiveness

•We examine the performance of the EVAAS URM and other teacher value-added methods.•OLS does at least as well as the URM in correctly ranking teachers in many scenarios.•The URM approach is similar to an empirical Bayes’ approach.•OLS does better than EB and URM when teachers are assigned based on past scores.