Each year, the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) publishes the "State Teacher Policy Yearbook," a comprehensive examination of the state laws, rules and regulations that govern the teaching profession, measured against a realistic set of reform goals. For five years running, the full "Yearbook" compendium…

This publication highlights Rhode Island's EdStat, a system of performance management that has enabled the Rhode Island Department of Education to monitor the progress of its participating LEAs and its own offices on Race to the Top implementation and outcomes.

This publication describes new ways that States redesigning their educator effectiveness systems are measuring growth in student achievement, including value-added models and student learning objectives. The publication concludes with a brief discussion of communicating the results of student growth measures, such as monitoring correlations…

Until recently, states focused on ensuring the presence of a "highly qualified teacher" in every classroom. Under the 2001 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB), this title described a teacher holding at least a bachelor's degree and the appropriate state license and…

In a 2012 paper for the Center for American Progress, "The State of Evaluation Reform," Patrick McGuinn (Drew University) identified the opportunities and challenges facing education agencies in Race to the Top (RTTT) grant-winning states as they prepared for the implementation of new teacher evaluation systems. The 2012 study undertook…

Representatives of five Race to the Top grantees--Delaware, New York, North Carolina, Ohio and Rhode Island--gathered in Providence, Rhode Island on December 12, 2012 under the auspices of the Quality Evaluation Rollout (QER) Working Group to plan strategies for improving communication between teachers and State education agencies (SEAs) on…

The Race to the Top - Early Learning Challenge (RTT-ELC) program, authorized by Congress in 2011, is designed to improve the quality of early learning and development programs for children from birth through age 5. This discretionary grant program is administered jointly by the U.S. Departments of Education (ED) and Health and Human Services…

This Race to the Top - Early Learning Challenge (RTT-ELC) final performance report for the year 2016 describes Rhode Island's vision for RTT-ELC, what has changed in Rhode Island and in early learning programs as a result of RTT-ELC, and the lessons learned in implementing a comprehensive reform agenda. The RTT-ELC grant offered Rhode Island the…

It has been three years since Race to the Top grant-winning states piloted new teacher evaluation systems and many of them have made considerable progress, yet according to media coverage and a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report published in April 2015, struggles remain and most grantees have asked to extend the timetables for…

Race to the Top States offer a wide range of supports for local educational agency (LEA) implementation of one of four school intervention models. Some States allocate resources on a regional basis, while others coordinate resources at the State level. Certain States also use data tools to measure district needs, capacity and progress on key…

In this article, we explain how overly prescriptive, rigid state statutory and regulatory policy frameworks regarding teacher evaluation, tenure and employment decisions outstrip the statistical reliability and validity of proposed measures of teaching effectiveness. We begin with a discussion of the emergence of highly prescriptive state…

This State-specific summary report serves as an assessment of Rhode Island's Year 3 Race to the Top implementation, highlighting successes and accomplishments, identifying challenges, and providing lessons learned from implementation from approximately September 2013 through September 2014. Building upon the successes of Years 1 through 3, in Year…

The Race to the Top - Early Learning Challenge (RTT-ELC) program, authorized by Congress in 2011, is designed to improve the quality of early learning and development programs for children from birth through age 5. This discretionary grant program is administered jointly by the U.S. Departments of Education (ED) and Health and Human Services…

This Race to the Top - Early Learning Challenge (RTT-ELC) annual performance report for the year 2015 describes Rhode Island's accomplishments, lessons learned, challenges, and strategies Rhode Island will implement to address those challenges. In 2015, Rhode Island made significant progress toward its ambitious but achievable goals under the Race…

This brief provides a snapshot of the rules governing classroom observations used in teacher evaluations in selected Race to the Top grantees. The information was collected in response to a technical assistance request to the Reform Support Network (RSN) from Georgia, where education leaders charged with designing that State's teacher evaluation…