A study investigated how a teacher managed her whole-language instructional approach within the constraints of the district skills-based evaluation program. Data gathering and analysis took place over a 5-month period in a first-grade urban midwestern classroom. Data included field notes, interviews, artifacts, and classroom observations. The teacher expressed the conflict she had with the demand for traditional evaluation measures and what she thought was useful to her as a teacher. She devised a combination of techniques to meet these demands: she integrated some traditional quantitative assessment and used periodic checks from standardized measures provided by basal reader publishers. A great deal of evaluation information was gathered by the teacher informally through daily and weekly observations describing children's literacy behaviors. As the year progressed, the teacher kept careful records on student writing and the children's growing knowledge of letter/sound relations. Assigning writing grades produced a continual dilemma for the teacher. As a necessary compromise, the teacher produced the kind of evaluation her district demanded and also managed her needs as a whole language teacher. At the heart of her evaluation, the teacher constructs meaning for herself and her students in ways that are child-centered and consistent with theoretical groundings. (Completed samples of a parent questionnaire, a reading questionnaire, a child's actual oral reading behavior, and a letter identification score sheet are attached.) (RS)