Passing Muster: Evaluating Teacher Evaluation Systems

As states and districts across the country craft and begin to implement new teacher-evaluation systems, an important question arises: How will we ensure that new systems accurately and reliably assess teacher effectiveness? To find answers, Brookings guru Russ Whitehurst assembled a top-of-the-line task force and asked them to investigate “relative strength of prediction,” value-added methodologies, and reliability. And deep into the weeds of these concepts they dive. In the end, they propose a metric against which evaluation systems can be appraised (and a handy Excel calculator to help districts determine the accuracy of their teacher-evaluation systems). As with other efforts from Brookings, this report is not a walk in the park, but if you like wonky, it’s just for you.