Understanding teacher learning, and relations between that learning and practice, has become a research priority in the quest for quality. Managerial policy discourses that commodify teachers as academic capital encourage institutions to adopt linear models of professional learning and development (PLD) as auditable value-adding, yet this…

Schools often struggle to attract and retain high-performing teachers and to develop or remove low-performing ones. In this study, the researchers considered whether this is true in New Orleans where almost all schools are charters with flexibility over personnel policies and practices, and where schools compete against one another and face…

Since the adoption of teacher evaluation systems that rely, at least in part, on controversial student achievement measures, little research has been conducted that focuses on stakeholders' perceptions of systems in practice, specifically school principals. This study was conducted in a large urban school district to better understand principals'…

Many schools and districts have considerable discretion when hiring teachers, yet little is known about how that discretion should be used. Using data from a new teacher screening system in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), we find that performance during screening, and especially performance on specific screening assessments, is…

With more rigorous standards and testing at the forefront of educational reform across the nation, the rural school district in this study developed a strategic compensation plan with bonus pay based on student test scores as a teacher success incentive. A causal-comparative study was conducted to examine the effect of teacher merit pay levels on…

Papay (2011) noticed that teacher value-added measures (VAMs) from a statistical model using the most common pre/post testing timeframe--current-year spring relative to previous spring (SS)--are essentially unrelated to those same teachers' VAMs when instead using next-fall relative to current-fall (FF). This is concerning since this choice--made…

Ratings are present in many areas of assessment including peer review of research proposals and journal articles, teacher observations, university admissions and selection of new hires. One feature present in any rating process with multiple raters is that different raters often assign different scores to the same assessee, with the potential for…

Value-added "Progress" measures are to be introduced for all English schools in 2016 as "headline" measures of school performance. This move comes despite research highlighting high levels of instability in value-added measures and concerns about the omission of contextual variables in the planned measure. This article studies…

Despite growing interest in the importance of nonacademic skills for student success, very few studies have examined the extent to which schools and teachers are associated with gains in these outcomes. This descriptive study adds to the nascent literature by examining the amount of school- and teacher-associated variation in kindergarten…

The U.S. Department of Education has recently called on all states to create plans to ensure equal access to excellent teachers. Although there are numerous limitations in using VAM [value-added modeling] in high-stakes contexts such as teacher evaluation, such techniques offer promise in helping states grapple with issues in equitable access.…