Performance evaluation may change employee effort and decisions in unintended ways, for example, in multitask jobs where the evaluation measure captures only a subset of (differentially weights) the job tasks. We show evidence of this multitask distortion in schools, with teachers allocating effort across students (tasks). Teachers are evaluated…

This study sought to identify correlations between constructs of teacher leadership, teacher efficacy, and teacher evaluation. Teacher perceptual data of support of teacher leadership, perceptual data on personal teacher efficacy, and teacher self-reported scores from the North Carolina Educator Evaluation System were gathered. The relationships…

The levels and growth achievement functions make extreme and diametrically opposed assumptions about the rate at which teacher inputs persist. I first show that if these assumptions are incorrect, teacher value-added estimates can be significantly biased. I then develop a tractable, cumulative model of student achievement that allows for the joint…

North Carolina has operated one of the country's largest pay-for-performance teacher-bonus programs since the late 1990s. New research shows that a North Carolina-style incentive-pay program has the potential to improve student learning by encouraging teachers to exert more effort on the job. The North Carolina model avoids three pitfalls…

Despite policy efforts to encourage multiple measures of performance in newly developing teacher evaluation systems, practical constraints often result in evaluations based predominantly on formal classroom observations. Yet there is limited knowledge of how these observational measures relate to student achievement. This article leverages the…

The identification of effective teaching is a continuous and challenging task. This study was an investigation of the relationship among the teacher evaluation, student perception surveys, and student growth scores of students in grades 3 through 8. The entire population of the small district was included in the study. The sources for this study…

Policymakers appear increasingly inclined to utilize measures of student achievement, often state assessment results, to inform high-stakes teacher personnel decisions. This has been spurred on by the federal government's Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) and Race to the Top (RttT) grant programs, each of which urge states and localities to tie teacher…

Responding to federal policy and recent research, states and districts have developed and begun implementing multiple-measure teacher evaluation systems. These systems generally include observational and/or student survey measures of instructional quality alongside measures of teachers' contributions to student learning (e.g., value-added models…

States are pushing ahead with efforts to make sweeping changes to education policy through the Race to the Top program, despite some of them having seen individual schools and districts back out of the process because of concerns over the time and money required to make those plans a reality. The Obama administration has envisioned Race to the…

In fall 2009, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project to test new approaches to recognizing effective teaching. The project's goal is to help build fair and reliable systems for teacher observation and feedback to help teachers improve and administrators make better personnel decisions.…

In fall 2009, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project to test new approaches to measuring effective teaching. The goal of the MET project is to improve the quality of information about teaching effectiveness available to education professionals within states and districts--information that…

Extensive education research on the contribution of teachers to student achievement produces two generally accepted results. First, teacher quality varies substantially as measured by the value added to student achievement or future academic attainment or earnings. Second, variables often used to determine entry into the profession and…

This paper explores the relationship between teacher testing and teacher effectiveness using a unique data set that links teachers to their individual students. The findings show a positive relationship between some teacher licensure tests and student achievement. They also suggest that states face significant tradeoffs when they require…

This study examined practices of teachers in Wake County Public Schools' (WCPSS) middle school Algebra I classes. Regression analyses of standardized state testing results allowed for identification of the most effective and least effective Algebra I teachers. The study used surveys, observations, and focus group interviews to compare and contrast…

Administrative data on fifth grade students in North Carolina shows that more highly qualified teachers tend to be matched with more advantaged students, both across schools and in many cases within them. This matching biases estimates of the relationship between teacher characteristics and achievement; we isolate this bias in part by focusing on…