Improving Teacher Evaluation Systems (Online Discussion)

The evidence is clear: better teachers improve student outcomes, ranging from test scores to college attendance rates to career earnings.  Federal policy has begun to catch up with these findings in its recent shift toward policies intended to incentivize states to evaluate and retain teachers based on their classroom performance. A majority of states have passed laws requiring the adoption of teacher evaluation systems that incorporate student achievement data, but only a handful of states had fully implemented new teacher evaluation systems as of the 2012-13 school year. The time is right to ask how existing teacher evaluation systems are performing and in what practical ways they might be improved.

This month, the Brown Center on Education Policy released a new report that helps to answer those questions. The report, which examines the design and performance of new teacher evaluation systems in four urban school districts, indicates that nearly all the opportunities for improvement to teacher evaluation systems are in the area of classroom observations rather than in test score gains. 

At 11:00 a.m. EST on Tuesday, May 13, report authors Russ Whitehurst and Matthew Chingos and special guests Dan Goldhaber and Sandi Jacobs discussed noteworthy findings from the report – and their implications for the future of teacher evaluation systems. Watch the discussion below.