Novice teachers' professional contexts may have important implications for their effectiveness, development, and retention. However, due to data limitations, descriptions of these contexts are often unidimensional or vague. Using 10 years of administrative data from the Los Angeles Unified School District, we describe patterns of new teacher…

Concerned about the expense of teacher turnover, its disruption to schools and students, and its potential effect on students' access to effective teachers, the School District of Philadelphia partnered with the Regional Educational Laboratory Mid-Atlantic to better understand students' access to effective teachers and the factors related to…

Concerned about the expense of teacher turnover, its disruption to schools and students, and its potential effect on students' access to effective teachers, the School District of Philadelphia (SDP) partnered with the Regional Educational Laboratory Mid-Atlantic to better understand students' access to effective teachers and the factors related to…

Responding to an Illinois law that took effect in 2010, the Performance Evaluation Reform Act (PERA), Chicago Public Schools (CPS) created and implemented the REACH (Recognizing Educators Advancing Chicago's Students) educator evaluation and support system. REACH was piloted in 2012-13. It is still being implemented as of the 2019-20 school year…

Presently, across the nation, immigration headlines grip the public's attention with negative messages, under the assumption that immigrants are stereotyped as either individuals with criminal intent or people who are unpatriotic to the United States. Under this thought, politicians scramble to meet the needs of their state by protecting their…

The federal government's Race to the Top competition has promoted the adoption of test-based value-added measures (VAMs) of performance as a component of teacher evaluations throughout many states, but the validity of these measures has been controversial among researchers and widely contested by teachers' unions. A key concern is the extent to…

The five thoughtful papers included in this issue of "Educational Researcher" ("ER") raise new questions about the use of value-added methods (VAMs) to estimate teachers' contributions to students' learning as part of personnel evaluation. The papers address both technical and implementation concerns, considering potential…

It is common knowledge that teacher quality is a key in-school factor affecting student achievement. While the quality of teaching clearly matters for how much students learn, this quality is challenging to measure. Evaluating teacher quality based on the level of their students' end-of-year test scores has been one method of assessing…

Over the past decade, states and districts have updated teacher evaluation systems in response to federal incentives, such as waivers to No Child Left Behind and grants from Race to the Top. The use of multiple measures, however, raises an important issue for policymakers and practitioners: to what extent should different measures of a teacher's…

Many schools and districts have considerable discretion when hiring teachers, yet little is known about how that discretion should be used. Using data from a new teacher screening system in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), we find that performance during screening, and especially performance on specific screening assessments, is…

In most U.S. schools, teachers are evaluated using observation of teaching practice (OTP). This study investigates rater effects on OTP ratings among 421 principals in an authentic teacher evaluation system. Many-facet Rasch analysis (MFR) using a block of shared ratings revealed that principals generally (a) differentiated between more and less…

The vast majority of studies concerning the implementation of quality assurance in higher education institutions have been conducted from a national perspective, with few cross-national studies. This study aimed to explore the implementation of quality assurance standards in Europe from a comparative perspective. A questionnaire based on…

Major teacher evaluation changes have occurred across the nation during the past decade. Pressed by federal education initiatives and encouraged by research on promising teacher evaluation practices, states and school districts have implemented evaluation systems using new measures of educator practice and student learning. A growing body of…

The question of how academics in higher education institutions demonstrate they have the ability to teach and provide a high quality learning experience challenges the sector. Within this context, the use of professional dialogue for recognising teaching expertise is growing. This qualitative research explored how 16 academics valued their…

The current focus on identifying criteria for academic teaching practice is influencing performance goals for teaching academics. This has produced a strong imperative to engage with the scholarship of teaching and learning; however, it is not always clear how teaching academics continue to build capacity to do this during their academic career.…