Education Next – Chad Aldeman
“When President Obama took office in 2009, his administration quickly seized on teacher evaluations as an important public-policy problem. Today, much of his legacy on K–12 education rests on efforts to revamp evaluations in the hopes of improving teaching across the country, which his administration pursued via a series of incentives for states. In response, many states adopted new systems in which teachers’ performance would be judged, in significant part, on their contributions to growth in student achievement. Those moves have paid off in some ways, but in others, they backfired. Teacher evaluations today are more nuanced than they were eight years ago, and have contributed to better decisionmaking and enhanced student achievement in some districts. But progress was uneven, hampered by both design flaws and capacity challenges.”(more)