Researchers and policymakers in the US and beyond increasingly seek to identify teaching qualities that are associated with academic achievement gains for K-12 students through effectiveness studies. Yet teaching quality varies with academic content and social contexts, involves multiple participants, and requires a range of skills, knowledge, and…

The traditional approach to estimating the consistency of school effects across subject areas and the stability of school effects across time is to fit separate value-added multilevel models to each subject or cohort and to correlate the resulting empirical Bayes predictions. We show that this gives biased correlations and these biases cannot be…

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…