Teacher evaluation is a high-priority topic--and a hotly debated issue--among school and district administrators, teacher leaders, union reps, and state and federal policy makers.  The well-documented shortcomings of existing methods (principal drive-by observations, hiring interviews and selection procedures, tenure reviews, etc.) all lead to the same conclusion: nearly every teacher “passes” whatever “test” they face.  The “tests” themselves do not discriminate good from poor performers and there is virtually no connection between these tests and student achievement. Moreover, the feedback teachers receive from the process provides little to no meaningful guidance on how to improve teaching craft. 

Fortunately, current policy trends and requirements (such as funding from Race to the Top) are forcing school systems to rethink and redesign their teacher evaluation procedures. But given the lack of high-quality and data driven evidence to guide these development plans, there is a significant risk that any new systems developed may offer little more than the status quo.

This definitive work on the topic of teacher evaluation is based on The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) Project. Researchers with MET--one of the largest studies of teacher evaluation systems to date--spent three years studying some 3,000 teacher volunteers across the country, typically from largely urban districts with high levels of poverty. The MET team collected and tested multiple indicators of teacher effectiveness: in-depth classroom observations, student-reported surveys, assessments of teachers’ content knowledge, and value-added modeling of student test scores on multiple types of assessments. Initial findings support the use of these multiple measures for assessing teacher effectiveness. While student test scores can be a strong predictor of teacher performance, factoring in these additional measures paints a more vivid picture of a teacher’s effectiveness, and also improves the chances that practitioners (school leaders and coaches) can provide meaningful feedback that will help teachers improve.

With contributions from MET researchers around the country, this book distills original research using the MET data set to address the top questions of practitioners involved in designing fair and reliable teacher evaluation
systems.