Although much of the impetus for new approaches to teacher evaluation comes from policymakers at the state and national levels, the design of any particular teacher evaluation system falls to the roughly 16,000 school districts and 5,000 independent public charter schools in the country. A new report from the Brookings Institution, Passing Muster: Evaluating Teacher Evaluation Systems, addresses teacher evaluation systems in the context of this particular challenge: How can state or federal governments achieve a uniform standard for dispensing funds to school districts for recognition of exceptional teachers, without imposing a uniform system on those districts? Because of the immaturity of the knowledge base on teacher evaluation design and local politics of school management, the report anticipates great variability among districts as they set about evaluating teachers, even as most move to new systems that ostensibly improve on earlier models. The report recommends that governments dispense funds to local districts by scaling funding to the reliability of each district’s evaluation system. School districts with more reliable systems that would be able to accurately identify a greater proportion of their teachers as exceptional would receive funding in line with those numbers. The report also suggests “simple and straightforward” procedures by which the reliability of a district-level teacher evaluation system could be assessed by state or federal officials.
The report includes a downloadable calculator that allows users to determine the percentage of the total teacher workforce who can be identified as exceptional based on the characteristics of the teacher evaluation system.
To view the full report and explore the calculator, see http://www.brookings.edu/reports/2011/0426_evaluating_teachers.aspx
Core Education designs comprehensive teacher and principal evaluation systems, protocols, and rubrics. For more information about our services, see www.CoreEducationLLC.com/page5.php.
