Prior research has documented the failure of both staff development and teacher evaluation practices in schools to serve as sources of accountability and improvement for teachers. Few districts coordinate these two aspects of a human resource management system. Using a concept of organizational control, this study employs a qualitative methodology involving elite interviews and document inspection to investigate the experiences of four school districts engaged in a process of evaluation reform. The function of staff development as a mechanism of input control is explored, and the impact on evaluation outcomes is examined. Each district used staff development resources to address the beliefs, attitudes, and skill levels of teachers and administrators that have impeded effective evaluation in the past. The availability of developmental resources that supported evaluative feedback so that teachers could act on the results appeared to be crucial to success. Teacher evaluation, approached in this manner, expands on traditional notions of accountability and improvement that focus on the poor or marginal teacher. Maintenance of effective classroom performance becomes a legitimate goal of evaluation. These tentative findings suggest that a single teacher evaluation system, properly conceived, may be able to simultaneously serve as a source of accountability and improvement for teachers. An appendix describes the methodology employed in the study. (Author/PN)