People who emphasize teaching quality and the central importance of teachers are right to do so. Where some go wrong is in thinking that teacher quality is an innate characteristic. The effectiveness of a teacher is not some inherent competence, as the phrase "teacher quality" suggests. Teacher effectiveness is contextual. Why has the…

Systemic efforts to strengthen teacher preparation in Louisiana led to the first statewide value-added assessment (VAA) of teacher preparation programs (TPPs). Subsequently, a number of states have adopted VAA of TPPs. The authors describe challenges that were confronted around the deployment of Louisiana's VAA of TPPs. The discussion is organized…

The National Association for Kinesiology in Higher Education conference theme -- "Leading Beyond the Campus: Driving Change as Experts" -- responds to public policy demands and signals consequential choices. Many choices are illuminated by the prototype for the Neo-liberal university. Essentially, economic development imperatives give…

All enrollment managers face some level of challenge related to decentralized decision making and operations. Policies and practices can vary considerably by academic area, creating administrative complexity, restricting the scope and speed of institutional initiatives, and limiting potential efficiencies. Central attempts to standardize or…

Data has played an important role in England's recent school improvement journey. The evolution of the approach has not been perfect but the National Pupil Database has become a vital tool for health checking the education system, driving accountability, directing education policymaking, and tracking the educational attainment of key vulnerable…

Northwest Evaluation Association™ (NWEA™) conducts norming studies every several years to provide the best and most up-to-date information we can about student achievement and growth to better support educational decision-making. It is an important part of our commitment to our partners. The most recent NWEA norms were released in July 2015. Just…

Training school leaders in the key areas of policy and state laws, basic statistical literacy, assessment types and purposes, and value-added models is particularly important because ideas shaping teacher performance evaluation are being considered at the national, state, and local levels. The authors argue that providing school leaders with this…

Since the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in 2015, state teams have been preparing their state plans aligned with ESSA for submission in April or September 2017 to the U.S. Department of Education. Because ESSA lands much of the decision-making and responsibility in education at the state and local levels, state education leaders…

The well known 1983 report "A Nation at Risk" recommended that individuals preparing to teach should meet high education standards and demonstrate an aptitude for teaching and competence in an academic discipline--adding also that college and university teacher preparation programs should be judged by how well their graduates meet these…

Recently, student outcomes have bubbled to the top of debates about how to evaluate teaching in community and liberal arts colleges, universities, and professional schools, but even more international attention has been riveted on how outcomes are being used to evaluate teachers and administrators K-12 (Harris, 2012; Rowen & Raudenbush, 2016;…

Passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in December 2015 signaled a new era for teacher evaluation reform. Under ESSA, states and districts have greater autonomy to design and implement teacher evaluation systems independent of federal influence. This new flexibility brings with it new responsibilities and challenges for states and…

This article describes how evidence-based theory fuels an audit culture for teacher education in the USA, placing faculty under monitoring and surveillance, and severely constraining judgment, discretion, and professional decision-making. The national education reform efforts, Race to the Top and Common Core State Standards, demand fealty to…

This publication describes new ways that States redesigning their educator effectiveness systems are measuring growth in student achievement, including value-added models and student learning objectives. The publication concludes with a brief discussion of communicating the results of student growth measures, such as monitoring correlations…

States are in various stages of reforming how they evaluate their educators, all striving for a new system that can assess a range of abilities and practices over long periods of time and capture the full nature of an educator's performance. The strongest systems look at teaching in a more comprehensive way than evaluations have done in the past,…