Describes the Staff Performance Improvement and Appraisal Program at Newport-Mesa, California (Author)

A Newport Beach, California, teacher evaluates that district's Staff Performance Improvement and Appraisal Program. (JF)

This article attempts to provide British educators, who face a similar trend, with a synthesis of some major developments in the Accountability in Education movement in the United States. (Author/SJL)

Contends that replacing administrators by teacher committees will not solve management problems and will give teacher unions too much power in the management of schools. (Author/TE)

Reform measures have had little effect on increasing high school students' academic performance. Instructional quality is largely determined by the attitude, competence, and talent of teachers and principals responsible for delivering classroom instruction. Contracts should be revised to increase teachers' starting salaries, enforce accountability…

Holding teachers responsible for the behavior of students is an inappropriate policy that results in ineffective teaching, diminished enthusiasm for learning, and lower levels of achievement. The reasons this is so are discussed. Students must be responsible for their own learning. (Author/SLD)

School inspections under England's Office for Standards in Education (OfSTED) involve observation and grading of individual staff's teaching performance. Results are reported to headteachers. Research in secondary schools has discovered substantial, widespread discrepancies between inspectors' gradings of "very poor" teachers and…

Multiyear study of a small school district in Virginia finds that portfolios enhance the accountability and professional development purposes of teacher evaluation. While finding portfolios to be fair and accurate measures of teacher performance, teachers and administrators expressed concern about the time required to develop them. (Contains 3…

This paper describes, in the context of one highly circumscribed element of English educational policy, namely, "Threshold assessment," the ways in which the boundaries between the public and the private have become increasingly porous and blurred. In this context, some consequences and implications of private sector involvement in…

Education reforms such as "A Nation at Risk" and "Goals 2000" have come and gone. However, we can be confident that the goal of student improvement shall not pass if the core mission is student learning. The true mission of learning has prompted educators to ponder the following questions: How do we need each student to behave?…

In this report, the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) takes a close look at the governance of the teaching profession and finds that state legislators and other state-level policymakers crafting state laws and regulation, not those bargaining at the local level, decide some of the most important rules governing the teaching profession.…

If faculty are to interpret activities data collection and analysis as a positive means of reviewing their own accomplishments, assisting them in professional improvement, shedding light on load inequities, justifying financial reallocations and other things that are important to them, the data analysis process must reflect those concerns. (Author)

Teachers of business communication, along with teachers in other disciplines, must develop ways of responding to demands for faculty evaluation. The first section of this paper considers three questions relevant to any kind of faculty evaluation: To whom should a teacher be accountable? What criteria should be the touchstones for evaluation? and,…

This transcript of a National Public Radio program discusses the subject of teacher effectiveness under the following topics: (1) rating teachers by student test scores; (2) observation method of teacher evaluation; (3) self-evaluation of teachers; (4) subtle ways of weeding out ineffective teachers; (5) impact of accountability on the teaching…