Leaders’ Negotiation of Teacher Evaluation Policy in Immigrant-Serving Schools

This paper examines how school leaders working within schools serving immigrant English Learners negotiate teacher evaluation policies, including how they influence compliance with mandated policies, communicate those policies to teachers, and guide implementation within their professional communities. We explore how a leader in a school with positive outcomes negotiates external policies to support authentic professional growth and maximize learning opportunities for immigrant ELs. In addition, we draw on data from a comparison school that also serves a high proportion of ELs, but where policies have been enacted in ways that focus on compliance, increase anxiety, and add little value to EL students. In doing so, we show how leaders can mitigate the unintended consequences of mandated policies by addressing teachers’ uncertainty and anxieties, while reaffirming humanizing institutional practices that honor the local knowledge of teachers and deepen teachers’ collective responsibility for immigrant youth.

Social networks and policy coherence: Administrators’ Common Core and teacher evaluation advice networks

In this study, we aim to deepen understanding of what it would take to develop the relationships, common understandings, and collective expertise that might support district-wide improvement efforts by examining the implementation of the Common Core and a teacher evaluation policy. Drawing on three years of social network data in three districts, we find that administrators were more likely to be talking together about teacher evaluation than the Common Core. Further, administrators with more positive views of the potential impact of these policies and their access to the human and technical resources necessary for implementation were more likely to engage in positive information seeking behaviors. These findings have important implications for policies intended to increase instructional coherence in schools and districts.

Principal-Led State Evaluation Policy: Teacher Perceptions at Four High Schools

While policy makers have attempted to standardize teacher evaluation, policy is implemented and enacted by school administrators. This study addresses the following question: Considering the legislative efforts to remove control of evaluation from local figures, do teachers perceive school principals as influencing the implementation of state-level evaluation policy and, if so, in what ways? I examined interviews from 14 teachers across four high schools within a district in North Carolina derived from a larger mixed method case study of teacher perceptions of evaluation policy and classroom practice. The results suggest a state-centralized teacher evaluation policy, such as the one utilized at the time of this study, can look vastly different to teachers at the school-level due to principal enactment of the policy. Furthermore, the data suggest the following themes influenced policy implementation: the capacity of principals to evaluate in a timely manner, what a principal chooses to value in a policy, and the perceived effectiveness of a principal as an evaluator of teaching. By taking a closer look at what is happening “on the ground” between teachers and principals in four schools utilizing the same state-level evaluation policy, the lessons learned in this study can help inform future policies.

Professionalism and Parents: A New Frame for Color-Blind Racism in Schooling

This study deconstructs the racial dimension of teacher resistance to parent authority within the shared social institution of education. More specifically, we examine how teachers responded to a teacher evaluation policy that included a parent-based component to assess teacher quality. Using framing theory, this study illustrates the use of professionalism as one mechanism connecting teachers’ individual actions to broader sociocultural experiences of privilege and oppression. To illustrate the anatomy of color-blind framing, we deconstruct three tactics teachers used when framing their resistance to parents: minimizing professional responsibility for engaging parents, masking racist perspectives through geographic and social distance, and misdirecting attention away from parents’ rights to judge education as a public good.

Better integrating summative and formative goals in the design of next generation teacher evaluation systems

In current teacher evaluation systems, the two main purposes of evaluation—accountability/goal accomplishment (summative) and professional growth/improvement (formative)—are often at odds with one another. However, they are not only compatible, but linking them within a unified teacher evaluation system may, in fact, be desirable. The challenge of the next generation of teacher evaluation systems will be to better integrate these two purposes in policy and practice. In this paper, we integrate the frameworks of Self-determination theory and Stronge’s Improvement-Oriented Model for Performance Evaluation. We use this integrated framework to critically examine teacher evaluation policy in Hawaii and Washington, D.C.—two distinctly different approaches to teacher evaluation—for the purposes of identifying a set of clear recommendations for improving the design and implementation of teacher evaluation policy moving forward.

How middle school special and general educators make sense of and respond to changes in teacher evaluation policy

In this multiple case study, we apply sensemaking theory to examine and compare how middle school special and general educators perceive and respond to teacher evaluation reform, including formal classroom observations, informal walkthroughs, and student growth measures. Our findings reveal that special educators experience conflict between the policy’s main elements and their understandings of how to effectively teach students with disabilities. Furthermore, special and general educators held contrasting beliefs regarding the appropriateness of evaluation. Our findings illustrate the importance of acknowledging differences in special and general educators’ roles and responsibilities and encourage policymakers to reconsider uniform teacher evaluation policies.