Passing Muster: Evaluating Teacher Evaluation Systems | Brookings Institution.
U.S. public schools are in the early stages of a revolution in how they go about evaluating teachers. In years past there was little more than intuition and anecdote to support the view that teachers vary in their quality. The little data that was available came from ratings of teachers carried out by school principals, a process that typically resulted in nearly all teachers receiving uniformly high ratings. It is nearly impossible to discover and act on performance differences among teachers when documented records show them all to be the same.
A new generation of teacher evaluation systems seeks to make performance measurement and feedback more rigorous and useful. These systems incorporate multiple sources of information, including such metrics as systematic classroom observations, student and parent surveys, measures of professionalism and commitment to the school community, more differentiated principal ratings, and test score gains for students in each teacher’s classrooms. The latter indicator, test score gains, typically incorporates a variety of statistical controls for differences among teachers in the circumstances in which they teach. Such a measure is called teacher value-added because it estimates the value that individual teachers add to the academic growth of their students.