Since the early 2000s, accountability and evaluation have been regarded by policymakers as key mechanisms for "fixing" teacher education and by many teacher education leaders as vehicles for elevating the status of the profession and uniting a fragmented field. Although educational inequity has been an enduring and endemic problem during…

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…

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…

A study of four teacher-evaluation programs--in Tennessee, Texas, Oregon, and Colorado--finds that measures of student learning can be an important source of feedback on the effectiveness of schools, administrators, and teachers. Includes extended description of Tennessee's accountability system that uses test scores in the evaluation of teachers.…

This book discusses four approaches to incorporating student achievement in teacher evaluation. Seven chapters discuss: (1) "Teacher Evaluation and Student Achievement: An Introduction to the Issues"; (2) "What is the Relationship between Teaching and Learning?" (e.g., whether teachers are responsible for student learning and…