Since its creation in 1987, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) has implemented a national voluntary system to assess and certify teachers who meet rigorous teaching standards. Testimony from over 16,000 NBPTS certified teachers has revealed that the journey toward certification is often difficult, time-consuming, and…

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…

A central concern of Joseph Milner's February 1991 "Kappan" article critiquing the North Carolina Teacher Performance Assessment Instrument is that teacher evaluation will drive teaching. He errs in confusing essential skills with basic skills, ignoring all teacher evaluation's purposes except instructional improvement, and claiming the…

In July 1985, 16 local school units began participating in the North Carolina Career Development Program Pilot. This report provides information about activities in the pilot program during the school year 1986-87. During that period, the following major activities occurred: (1) 42 percent of the participating employees earned Career Status II;…

Describes how North Carolina educators cooperated to build a system of teacher-performance appraisal. To build the program, educators derived basic teaching functions from literature and observed teachers to gather performance data. Training is now provided to districts, and information about effective teaching is disseminated throughout the…

In schools across the United States, an increasingly familiar sight is that of professional artists coming together with students and teachers for the purpose of learning in and through the arts. Musicians, dancers, visual artists, actors, storytellers, and others are finding exciting new professional opportunities as more and more schools are…

Experienced teachers in North Carolina benefit from an evaluation system that sets clear expectations and combines traditional evaluation with individual growth opportunities. The model is based on a regional educational laboratory's 10 years of experience in research and development in formative evaluation. Teacher self-assessment is a key…

The Certified School Personnel Evaluation Pilot Program (Outside Evaluator Project) has two primary purposes. The first is to compare evaluations performed by persons employed by an agency other than the units to which they are assigned with evaluations performed by locally-employed personnel. The second purpose is to determine the effectiveness…

Compares the validity of principals' judgments and teachers' self-ratings in an extensively developed program (North Carolina's Teacher Performance Appraisal Instrument), using a high-inference rating scale. Results did not support using principals' judgments on high-inference items when global inferences on teacher effectiveness are desired.…

Study tested the validity of a high inference principal-administered rating scale, the North Carolina Teacher Performance Appraisal Instrument. Researchers examined the relationship of its ratings to student achievement, nonachievement student variables, and teacher variables. Results indicate principals can become valid raters of teacher…

This paper presents the North Carolina edition of the National Council on Teacher Quality's 2008 "State Teacher Policy Yearbook". The 2008 "Yearbook" focuses on how state policies impact the retention of effective new teachers. This policy evaluation is broken down into three areas that encompass 15 goals. Broadly, these goals…

Educators in North Carolina, recognizing a need to develop a more objective, performance-based teacher evaluation system, determined that evaluation of teachers should have both formative and summative outcomes and should focus on improvement of teacher skills. The Teacher Performance Appraisal System (TPAS), a companion to the North Carolina…

For five years running, the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) has tracked states' teacher policies, preparing a detailed and thorough compendium of teacher policy in the United States on topics related to teacher preparation, licensure, evaluation, career advancement, tenure, compensation, pensions and dismissal. The 2011 State Teacher…

This paper describes the work of the Consortium for the Development of Thinking for Learning (CDTL), a committee under the auspices of the University of North Carolina that sought to introduce inservice programs in critical thinking and philosophy for children into the schools of North Carolina through a statewide network of inservice offerings.…

Texas and North Carolina have exhibited strong levels of commitment to define and enforce standards of competent performance in the teaching profession. To make up for a prior lack of definition of what constitutes teacher effectiveness, both states have developed similar systems of teacher appraisal. In North Carolina, the Teacher Performance…