The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) welcomes the efforts of federal, state, and local policymakers to find new ways to ensure an accomplished teacher for every student in America. The National Board has advanced this mission since its inception in 1987. Today, that mission is carried out by the tens of thousands of…

This paper presents myths as well as facts about value-added analysis. These myths include: (1) "Value-added isn't fair to teachers who work in high-need schools, where students tend to lag far behind academically"; (2) "Value-added scores are too volatile from year-to-year to be trusted"; (3) "There's no research behind value-added"; (4) "Using…

Measuring a teacher's effectiveness in quantifiable ways is a logical step in a society driven by the SMART goals (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely objectives) that pervade modern management. The idea of using student performance on standardized tests to judge a teacher's effectiveness picked up steam after the Obama…

As the profession of teaching continues to get more attention given recent events, a growing number of school districts from New York to California are adopting "value-added" measures of teaching quality to award bonuses or even tenure. And two competitive federal grants are spurring them on. The Teacher Incentive Fund has awarded 95…

This article addresses likely error rates for measuring teacher and school performance in the upper elementary grades using value-added models applied to student test score gain data. Using a realistic performance measurement system scheme based on hypothesis testing, the authors develop error rate formulas based on ordinary least squares and…

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…

This mixed methods study explored whether teachers who have experienced the new Massachusetts evaluation system as a member of three pilot or early adopter districts perceive it as a valuable process. The Race to the Top federal grant process required states to redesign evaluation systems that fostered effective teaching and included student…

This report represents the work of New Jersey's Evaluation Pilot Advisory Committee (EPAC) from 2011-2013. The EPAC Interim Report, published in February 2013, summarized the establishment of the EPAC, key lessons learned from the 2011-12 teacher evaluation pilot, and recommendations for statewide roll-out of a more effective educator evaluation…

In this webinar, Ellen Moir, CEO and founder of the New Teacher Center, shared research that shows evidence of the effectiveness of the NTC induction model in raising student achievement and its potential for reducing teacher attrition (Moir, 2009). This Q&A addressed the questions participants had for Ellen Moir following the webinar. The…

Recent state and federal policies generally focus on the individual teacher rather than the school organization. These reforms seem to assume that a teacher can do it all, that an individual who succeeds in one school can succeed in any school and, conversely, that a teacher who fails in one classroom will fail in all others. However, there is no…

Value-added models measure teacher performance by the test score gains of their students, adjusted for a variety of factors such as the performance of students when they enter the class. The measures are based on desired student outcomes such as math and reading scores, but they have a number of potential drawbacks. One of them is the…

There is no shortage of research on the importance of good teaching. For decades, study after study has shown that there are large differences in effectiveness from one teacher to another and that these differences can have a lifelong impact on students. A recent study that tracked 2.5 million students over 20 years determined that those with…

This paper investigates the extent to which spring-to-spring testing timelines bias teacher value-added as a result of conflating summer and school-year learning. Using a unique dataset that contains both fall and spring standardized test scores, the author examines the patterns in school-year versus summer learning. She estimates value-added…

If Indiana schools are going to prepare students for success in the 21st century, administrators and teachers need to work together toward a shared vision of excellence in the classroom. Indiana's innovative pilot evaluation systems give educators the tools and common language they need to have honest conversations about their most important job:…

Research has long been clear that teachers matter more to student learning than any other in-school factor. Improving the quality of teaching is critical to student success. Yet only recently have many states and districts begun to take seriously the importance of evaluating teacher performance and providing teachers with the feedback they need to…