In the last few years, all but a few U.S. states have rushed to enact tougher teacher evaluation systems. Spurred by the incentives offered by two federal education initiatives--Race to the Top and the ESEA Flexibility Program--these states have designed teacher evaluation systems designed to "remove ineffective tenured and untenured…

This article begins by clarifying the distinction between formative and summative evaluation that was first drawn by Michael Scriven (1967) in an influential essay regarding education evaluation. Scriven supplied his analysis soon after the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) was enacted in 1965--a time when almost no serious attention…

The tests we use to evaluate student achievement may well be sound measures of what students know, but they are faulty indicators at best of how well they have been taught. A remedy to this this situation of judging teachers by the performance of their students on high-stakes tests may be in hand already. We should look to the methods successfully…

Recent studies indicate that experienced teachers may not be more proficient than people off the street" in causing behavior changes in learners. (Author/LR)

Teachers should be evaluated chiefly by the results they produce. Those results will not be properly detected through the use of norm-referenced achievement tests (NRT) due to the following major deficits of NRT: (1) the descriptions of what is measured by NRT are far too loose; (2) evaluative expectations are unclear; (3) the necessity for NRT to…

This document, noting that teacher evaluation has now become a terror for teachers due to legislation such as the Stull Act, reviews the major assessment alternatives for teacher competence appraisal. The author discusses the use and merits of ratings, observations, and pupil test performance and finds them all to have fatal defects. He then…

Argues that the most widely used measures of a teacher's instructional skill -- ratings, classroom observations, pupil performance on standardized tests -- have proved inadequate and suggests that a teaching performance test would be an effective teacher assessment technique. (JF)

A discussion of accountability of teacher performance using domain-referenced tests. (HB)

As a method of helping teachers evaluate their own instructional performance on the basis of how that instruction affects learners, teaching performance tests may prove a useful ally to the elementary school principal. (Author)

The analysis is intended to provide California educators with a number of specific, step-by-step suggestions for devising the teacher appraisal systems required by new legislation in the Stull Bill. An overview of essential ingredients of the new requirements is given in the first part of this document in order to familiarize teachers with…

Norm-referenced testing is not appropriate for use in teacher evaluation. A truly equitable method of teacher evaluation is based on a clear set of instructional targets and on the teacher's effectiveness in helping students master the specific skills and knowledge targeted. (Author/MLF)

This presentation describes the rationale and major steps in the development of the Teacher's Test of Language Skills (TTLS) to be administered to selected certificated teachers in the Charleston County School District, South Carolina. The paper recounts the factors underlying the establishment of the School Board's policy, then traces the major…