This publication explores quickly deployable, high-impact tactics that State education agencies (SEAs) and local educational agencies (LEAs) are using to make their evaluation systems more manageable. It also examines the foundation upon which States and school districts must build high-quality, manageable evaluation systems.

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…

In accordance with the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law of 2001, 100% of students were expected to become proficient on state assessments of reading and mathematics by the end of 2013-2014 academic year. Schools that consistently failed to meet the NCLB's Adequate Yearly Progress requirements were subject to penalties. In 2011, the U.S.…

Amid the cacophony of special interests fighting to be heard in statehouses and on Capitol Hill, a cadre of current and former chief state school officers is elbowing its way into the nation's education debate at a time when states are taking more control of K-12 education. A little more than a year old, Chiefs for Change is an invitation-only…

Federal and state guidelines for school reform dominate the landscape of public education. Florida and its school districts, as a Race to the Top state, are in the process of fully implementing a value-added model of teacher evaluation. Effective school leaders are calling upon the theoretical framework of transformational, visionary and…

The statewide teaching performance assessment instruments being used in Georgia, North Carolina, and Florida were examined. Forty-one reliability and validity studies regarding the instruments in use in each state were collected from state departments and universities. Georgia uses the Georgia Teacher Performance Assessment Instrument. North…

Online learning holds promise for providing new educational opportunities to a wide range of students across the country. The rapid expansion of K-12 online learning, however, threatens to outpace the development of appropriate state-level policies that serve to fulfill the promise. As the National Association of State Boards of Education warned…

A MAILED QUESTIONNAIRE SURVEY WAS SENT TO THE DIRECTOR OF TEACHER EDUCATION AND/OR CERTIFICATION IN EACH STATE TO DETERMINE THE CONDITIONS UNDER WHICH STATEWIDE PROGRAMS FOR EVALUATING TEACHING CAN YIELD THE MOST USEFUL INFORMATION FOR IMPLEMENTING STATE EDUCATIONAL LEADERSHIP IN THE EDUCATION AND CERTIFICATION OF TEACHERS AND IN THE ACCREDITATION…

Materials collected in this book and in Volume II (SP 003 239) are outgrowths of the Multi-State Teacher Education Project (M-STEP), a 3-year program to strengthen the capacity of state departments of education in the development of joint responsibility between local education agencies and teacher education institutions with emphasis on laboratory…