The New York State Board of Regents has committed to the transformation of the preparation, support and evaluation of all teachers and school leaders in New York State, and the New York State Legislature has enacted historic legislation (Education Law §3012-c) that fundamentally changes the way teachers and principals are evaluated. Under the new…

The question for this brief is whether education leaders can use value-added measures as tools for improving schooling and, if so, how to do this. Districts, states, and schools can, at least in theory, generate gains in educational outcomes for students using value-added measures in three ways: creating information on effective programs, making…

Correlations for PDAS scores from year to year were moderate, and experienced teachers generally outperformed their novice peers. Data suggest a weak-to-moderate relationship between 3-year averages of teachers' PDAS and student growth scores.

In each of its teacher workforce reports over the past dozen years, the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning at WestEd (CFTL) has combined solid research, thoughtful analysis, and plain language to describe who is teaching California's 6.2 million students. This year the author and his colleagues have expanded that focus to include the…

Governors and other state leaders have shown an increasing interest in creating new models of teacher compensation that would reward educators based on their contributions to student learning. To support this interest, the National Governors Association (NGA) hosted a policy academy focusing on that issue. The policy academy provided teams with…

In August 2010 the "Los Angeles Times" published a special report on their website featuring performance ratings for nearly 6,000 Los Angeles Unified School District teachers. The move was controversial because the ratings were based on so-called value-added estimates of teachers' contributions to student learning. As with most…

A growing number of school districts are adopting "value-added" measures of teaching quality to award bonuses or even tenure. And two competitive federal grants are spurring them on. Districts using value-added data are encouraged by the results. But researchers who support value-added measures advise caution. The ratings, which use a…

It sounds so simple. If tests measure what a student learned, why can't they also be used to measure what a teacher taught? Wouldn't this data make it easy to distinguish good teachers from bad? And can't this information be used in teacher retention, tenure, salary, and other decisions? The use of student performance data to judge the quality of…

This paper uses ordinary least squares, logit and probit regressions, along with chi-square analysis applied to nationwide data from the New Zealand ratemyteacher website to establish if there is any correlation between student ratings of their teachers and the socioeconomic status of the school the students attend. The results show that students…

This study examined student success, failure, withdrawal, and satisfaction in online public relations courses based on instructor-student interaction, student-student interaction, and instructor presence. Student passing rates, D/F rates, withdrawal rates, and evaluations of instruction were compiled from fifty-one online PR courses run over the…

Learning to systematically analyze the relationship between teaching and student learning is an important but difficult skill to engender in teachers. In this study, we examine how pre-service teachers who were introduced to a framework for analyzing teaching in a video-based teacher education course drew on this tool to analyze their own practice…

We cannot achieve quality learning for all, or nearly all, students until quality development is attained and sustained for all teachers. (Fullan, 1994, p. 246) When the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001 was signed into law, the federal government made student achievement and teacher quality a national priority (U.S. Department of Education,…

The goal of the study was to investigate how teachers' reflection and asking for feedback--critical aspects of teachers' professional growth--can be explained and stimulated by teachers' self-efficacy, principals' feedback, and servant leadership characteristics. A mixed-method study was conducted with data collected from surveys and interviews…

"Value-added" measures of teacher effectiveness are the centerpiece of a national movement to evaluate, promote, compensate, and dismiss teachers based in part on their students' test results. Federal, state, and local policy-makers have embraced these measures in recent years as a means to objectively quantify teacher quality and to…

Forced into an uneasy balancing act between their members and the president they helped elect, the national teachers' unions are responding to the Obama administration's teacher-effectiveness agenda in notably different ways. Publicly at least, National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel has hewed closely to the union's internal…