Houston Independent School District (HISD) strives to provide an equitable education to all of its students. In an effort to uphold the district's mission, the Teacher Appraisal and Development System (TADS) was designed with the goal of promoting effective teaching by providing systematic, rigorous feedback on teachers' effectiveness in the…

The purpose of this study was to elicit elementary and middle school administrators' perceptions of the Ohio Teacher Evaluation System (OTES). The researchers created a questionnaire to learn administrators' experiences with and attitudes, opinions, beliefs, and knowledge of OTES thus far. The questionnaire consisted of twenty-five Likert-based…

Teacher performance evaluation currently is receiving unprecedented attention from policy makers, scholars, and practitioners worldwide. This study is one of the few studies of teacher perceptions regarding teacher performance measures that focus on China. We employed a quantitative dominant mixed research design to investigate Chinese teachers'…

As states and districts implement more rigorous teacher evaluation systems, measures of teacher performance are increasingly being used to support instruction and inform retention decisions. Classroom observations take a central role in these systems, accounting for the majority of teacher ratings upon which accountability decisions are based.…

Purpose: Brokering and buffering represent two ways in which principals may respond to hyperrational elements of policy demands in the current era of accountability. The purpose of this paper is to examine how some principals broker more efficient, measurable, and predictable evaluation practices for teachers and others buffer their teachers from…

Teacher evaluations in most school districts, until recently, have served as an exercise in compliance rather than a means to identify the strengths and weaknesses of each teacher in order to provide appropriate support to improve professional practice and increase student learning. Current federal legislation has stimulated districts to rethink…

In 2007, every district in North Carolina received access to EVAAS (Education Valued-Added Assessment System), a statistical tool designed to give principals a resource to make strong instructional decisions for their schools. The use of EVAAS has now worked its way into state law and its use is mandated in teacher evaluation. However, EVAAS is…

The 2017-18 National Teacher and Principal Survey (NTPS) is a nationally representative sample survey of public and private K-12 schools, principals, and teachers in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. State representative data are also available for public schools, principals, and teachers. NTPS collects data on core topics including…

Background/Context: Current efforts to build rigorous teacher evaluation systems has increased interest in standardized classroom observation tools as reliable measures for assessing teaching. However, many argue these instruments can also be used to effect change in classroom practice. This study investigates a model of professional development…

This article reports on a 2-year qualitative research study of the processes by which middle school principals' policies and actions shaped the experiences of five novice teachers in two Michigan school districts. We examined beginning teachers' perceptions of principals' approaches to managing student behavior, instructional leadership, and…

A variety of factors have converged in the last decade to focus attention on the need for more rigorous designs of professional development (PD). Teacher development is increasingly viewed as one of the primary levers for improving teaching quality and ultimately student achievement. The authors present data from the Teacher Knowledge Assessment…

The Houston Independent School District (HISD) launched the Effective Teachers Initiative (ETI) in 2010 with the goal of increasing teacher effectiveness to improve student achievement. As part of this initiative, HISD implemented the Teacher Appraisal and Development System (TADS) in the 2011-2012 school year to provide teachers, principals, and…

In an influential paper, Jesse Rothstein (2010) shows that standard value-added models (VAMs) suggest implausible and large future teacher effects on past student achievement. This is the basis of a falsification test that "appears" to indicate bias in typical VAM estimates of teacher contributions to student learning on standardized…

Student Growth Percentiles (SGPs) are increasingly being used in evaluations of teacher effectiveness. This study investigates two properties of SGPs: 1) SGP sensitivity to reference group characteristics such as sample size, free and reduced lunch (FRL) status, and English language learner (ELL) status; and 2) variation in score changes across…

New systems that seek to evaluate teachers with regard to their classroom quality often rely on observation instruments that capture general instructional pedagogies. However, decades of research suggest that content-specific dimensions of instruction also are important to differentiate teachers and improve student outcomes. We explore the degree…