Gateway Public Schools--a middle and high school serving a diverse group of about 800 students in San Francisco--was founded in 1998 by parents of students with learning disabilities seeking a supportive environment for their children. As a public charter organization with a lottery entrance system, Gateway seeks to admit a student body that…

There is a widespread consensus among practitioners, researchers, and policy makers that current teacher evaluation systems in most school districts do little to help teachers improve or to support personnel decision making. For this reason, new approaches to teacher evaluation are being developed and tested. There is also a growing consensus that…

Explores the role of teacher evaluation and suggests ways professionalism might be achieved through the evaluation process. Recommends that peer review might be an important means of defining and enforcing professional standards in teaching. (DR)

The papers in this collection report on various aspects of a project which studied the effects of educational policies upon classroom teaching. The background of the project is a set of intensive interviews of 43 randomly-selected teachers in 3 diverse school districts. In "Teaching Standards or Standardized Teaching," the point is made that…

This paper focuses on ways in which one state policy for improving education--standard-setting through testing mechanisms--affects the classroom teacher-learner relationship. That uniform policy-making is problematic is clear from observations of 43 Mid-Atlantic school district teachers. Responding to three types of standards, 45 percent found…