Attracting the best students into universities is a policy agenda driven by the state and universities in Estonia and Denmark. While the policy of internationalization of higher education (IoHE) in Estonia and Denmark is well crafted in the policy and academic domains, the value additions international graduates add to the learning environments…

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…

Despite the concerns regarding value-added models (VAMs), advocates hold strong to VAMs' theoretical strengths and potentials, while adopting a set of agreed-upon albeit "heroic" set of assumptions, without research in support. These assumptions transcend promotional, policy, media, and research-based pieces, but they have never been…

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…

Research on recently adopted methods for teacher evaluation are largely focused on issues of validity and pay less attention to the consequences of implementation for the everyday practices of teaching and learning in schools. This paper draws on an ethnographic case-study to argue that the joint tasks demanded by neoliberal teacher evaluation…

In recent years, states and districts have responded to federal incentives and pressure to institute major reforms to their teacher evaluation systems. The passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015 now provides state policymakers with even greater autonomy to redesign existing evaluation systems. Yet, little evidence exists to inform…

Recognizing the limitations of the existing frameworks and models applied to estimate the learning loss caused by COVID-19 across the world by different studies, and the urgent need for estimating such loss at the different education levels, this paper, employs the Education Value Chain Analysis ( EVCA) approach as a new paradigm, attempts to…

The purpose of this study is to critically evaluate value-added accountability measures currently enacted in the United States at the federal and state levels to assess teacher preparation programme (TPP) effectiveness. We draw on Newton and Shaw's framework for the evaluation of testing policy to evaluate the technical quality and social…

The specifics of how growth models should be constructed and used for educational evaluation is a topic of lively policy debate in states and school districts nationwide. In this article, we take up the question of model choice--framed within a policy context--and examine three competing approaches. The first approach, reflected in the popular…

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…

As a post-structural critique of US teacher evaluation policy, this paper aims to disrupt accepted conceptualizations of teachers by (1) identifying discursive constructions of teachers in political talk, action, and legislation; (2) unpacking the ways that these constructions operate to legitimize punitive accountability policies and practices;…

In recent decades, school performance ranking (or 'league table') have become a common feature of many education systems in the world. The ranking is usually published by government and news agencies in an attempt to measure and compare the relative performance of individual schools against a number of criteria, including academic performance.…

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'…

New York State has used the Growth Model for Educator Evaluation ratings since the 2011-2012 school year. Since that time, student growth percentiles have been used as the basis for teacher and principal ratings. While a great deal has been written about the use of student test scores to measures educator effectiveness, less attention has been…

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…