Teacher and Principal Accountability
Probably no issue is as directly related to student academic performance as the quality of teachers and school leaders. This section will highlight articles, research, and new policy developments in this highly sensitive, but important issue area.
RECENT NEWS/UPDATES:
Race to Top Winners Feel Heat on Teacher Evaluations (September 15, 2011)
Federal-grant recipients must live up to promises made in winning awards. Read more…
Envisioning New Directions in Teacher Evaluation: EdSource Brief (June, 2011)
Research confirms what many educators, students, and parents know intuitively—the most important thing a school can do to help students learn is to put them in a class with a highly effective teacher. Read more…
How state laws and collective bargaining shape the way teachers are evaluated, paid, and dismissed in California: EdSource Policy Guide (June, 2011)
In California, state law plus provisions of collective bargaining agreements function together to define the employment relationship between most teachers and their districts. Read more…
AB 5 Floor Analysis (May 27, 2011)
SUMMARY: Requires school districts to implement a best practices teacher evaluation system by July 1 of the fiscal year following the fiscal year in which the deficit factor is reduced to zero, as specified. Read more…
NEA Leaders Propose Teacher-Evaluation Shift (May 11, 2011)
National Education Association officials announced Wednesday that they would put a “policy statement” before the union?s governing body for approval that, among other changes, would open the door to the use of “valid, reliable, high-quality standardized tests,” in combination with multiple other measures, for evaluating teachers. Read more…
Lieberman: Make teacher evaluations a requirement for federal funds (March 14, 2011)
WASHINGTON–Sen. Joseph Lieberman is drafting a school reform bill that would tie a portion of federal education dollars to a requirement that states implement robust teacher evaluations, with student test scores being a major factor in rating teacher performance. Read more…
Remarks for AFT President Randi Weingarten – AFT Teacher Evaluation Conference – “Toward a True Development and Evaluation System” (February 24, 2011)
Thank you all for being here, at our second conference on teacher development and evaluation. I’d also like to thank the Gates Foundation, which has provided support for this conference and for some of the other work the AFT is doing to improve teaching and learning in our nation’s public schools. This conference is a forum for an important dialogue about how to develop and evaluate the art and the science of teaching in a way that helps teachers improve and students succeed. Read more…
Rethinking Evaluations When Almost Every Teacher Gets an A (January 20, 2011)
Grade inflation — a term normally associated with students — is widespread among Bay Area teachers, who receive so many favorable evaluations that it is impossible to tell how well they are performing, some educators say. Read more…
Policy Brief- Learning About Teaching (December 2010)
Initial Findings from the Measures of Effective Teaching Project – Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
For four decades, education research has confirmed what many parents know: A child’s learning depends on the talent and skills of the person leading his or her classroom. As much as parents worry about their local school, most eventually learn that their child’s teacher in that school matters even more. Read more…
What works in the classroom? Ask the students (December 10, 2010)
How useful are the views of public school students about their teachers? Quite useful, according to preliminary results released on Friday from a $45 million research project that is intended to find new ways of distinguishing good teachers from bad. Read more…
Foundation: Growth in test scores is sign of good teacher (December 10, 2010)
While debate rages in the education world about how to measure effective teaching – or whether it is even possible to do so – research funded by a prominent advocate of data-driven analysis has found that growth in annual student test scores is a reliable sign of a good teacher. Read more…
Study backs ‘value-added’ analysis of teacher effectiveness (December 11, 2010)
LOS ANGELES — Teachers’ effectiveness can be reliably estimated by gauging their students’ progress on standardized tests, according to the preliminary findings of a large-scale study released Friday by leading education researchers. Read more…
Gates Study Offers Teacher-Effectiveness Clues (December 10, 2010)
“Value added” gauges based on growth in student test scores and students’ perceptions of their teachers both hold promise as components of a system for identifying and promoting teacher effectiveness, according to preliminary findings from the first year of a major study. Read more…
CISI e-Bulletin: State Board Takes on Teacher Accountability Issues (November 16, 2010)
Teacher Incentive Fund Grants
During the fall workshops, we noted that the federal government has awarded Teacher Incentive Grants to two California school districts to develop “performance based compensation systems” (PBCS). One grant is $7,175,126 over five years to the Lucia Mar Unified School District (in San Luis Obispo County). Read More….
Redesigning Evaluation Processess (October 27, 2010)
A Systems Apporach to Improving Evaluation and Teacher/Principal Effectiveness
Among the many ideas for improving student performance, almost no reform strategy is attracting more attention currently than that of changing teacher evaluation systems to include some assessment of student learning. Read more…
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