Conceptions of Teacher Effectiveness and Its Implications for Educational Policy and Practice in the United States

This chapter provides an overview of the educational system from the founding of the country to today. Like Australia and Canada, the governmental structure involves the national government with smaller units in the form of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. This structure means variation of educational systems across governmental units. The authors provide an overview of the influence of conceptions of teaching effectiveness including the development of professional organization standards, passing of national legislation aimed at defining teacher effectiveness in terms of student outcomes, and standards-based teacher evaluation systems. Unique features of the United States perspective include a focus on differentiation to include getting to know the needs of individual students and meeting those individual needs. The authors describe the cultural basis for these unique features.

Policies That Define Instruction: A Systematic Review of States’ and Districts’ Recommendations for Evaluating Special Educators

Educational policies addressing instruction may fail to acknowledge that effective instruction is not the same for all learners. We reviewed teacher evaluation systems across all states and the 25 largest districts to determine how states and districts approach the evaluation of special education teachers, a policy aimed at improving teaching effectiveness. We found that most states and districts did not provide guidance to schools for adapting evaluation systems for these teachers. Some states provided guidance on technical aspects of special education teacher evaluation, such as incorporating student achievement into special education teachers’ scores. Districts were more likely to focus on instructional considerations. We discuss the implications of these findings for policies that aim to promote the use of effective instructional practices.

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.

Putting teachers evaluation systems on the map: An overview of state’s teacher evaluation systems post–Every Student Succeeds Act

The Every Students Succeeds Act (ESSA) loosened the federal policy grip over states’ teacher accountability systems. We present information, collected via surveys sent to state department of education personnel, about all states’ teacher evaluation systems post–ESSA, while also highlighting differences before and after ESSA. We found that states have decreased their use of growth or value-added models (VAMs) within their teacher evaluation systems. In addition, many states are offering more alternatives for measuring the relationships between student achievement and teacher effectiveness besides using test score growth. State teacher evaluation plans also contain more language supporting formative teacher feedback. States are also allowing districts to develop and implement more unique teacher evaluation systems, while acknowledging challenges with states’ being able to support varied systems, as well as incomparable data across schools and districts in effect.

Policies and practices of promise in teacher evaluation: The introduction to the special issue

This introduction to the special issue on “Policies and Practices of Promise in Teacher Evaluation,” (1) presents the background and policy context surrounding the ongoing changes in U.S. states’ teacher evaluation systems (e.g., the decreased use of value-added models (VAM)s for teacher accountability purposes); (2) summarizes the two commentaries and seven research papers that were peer-reviewed and ultimately selected for inclusion in this special issue; and (3) discussess the relevance of these pieces in terms of each paper’s contribution to the general research on this topic and potential to inform educational policy, for the better, after the federal government’s passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA, 2016).

Excavating theory in teacher evaluation: Implementing evaluation frameworks as Wengerian boundary objects

The purpose of this paper is to begin to excavate the unstated theoretical underpinnings of teacher evaluation systems as they exist in policy and practice and to explicitly consider how these evaluation systems might intersect theoretically with social learning theory. Research suggests that organizational leaders believe growth-based evaluation practices have yet-untapped potential to support teacher learning within teacher communities. However, models of teacher evaluation, as defined in federal and state policy and developed and implemented in practice, rarely make explicit the theoretical and conceptual frameworks upon which they are based. Further, evaluation models do not explicitly intersect with the conceptual frameworks for such learning, e.g., communities of practice (CoPs) and social learning theory. Rather, the role of teacher evaluation in social learning within and across educational organizations remains under-theorized. We argue for research examining potential connections in theory and practice between two existing conceptual frameworks: 1) social learning theory and 2) teacher evaluation systems (understood as policy, models, and practices).

Teacher Performance Appraisal Regulation: A Policy Case Analysis

This article uses an analysis of the language used in the Teacher Performance Appraisal Technical Requirements Manual in Ontario to highlight some procedural issues. Arguably, the existence of flaws in the teacher evaluation system is not only limited to evaluation practices but is also embedded in evaluation regulations. Furthermore, the article provides a novel example of how a study of teacher evaluation systems can go beyond teachers’ perspectives of evaluation practices and can also consider teacher evaluation regulations as a source of empirical inquiry and a form of knowledge.