The goal of this article is to clarify and unravel the complexity and challenges of improving teaching quality, based on measuring teaching quality and feeding back the results to teachers. We analyze different conceptualizations of teaching quality, and synthesize a framework for conceptualizing teaching quality in educational practice. We…

Helping students engage with complex texts has been a longstanding challenge, though teachers have received little guidance about practices that help students in engaging with texts. This paper provides a range of empirical evidence about a tool designed to provide formative insight into text-focused teaching, which we used to reliably score more…

This article begins by thinking about the process of accreditation in general and examining whether it is a transactional or value-added activity. The overall systems of U.S accreditation and National Association for Developmental Education (NADE) accreditation are reviewed.

A critical issue in educational evaluation is whether evaluations should focus on standardized (summative, often quantitative) or contextualized (formative or often qualitative) evidence. The author of this article advises readers to beware of false dichotomies. The big issue is not whether evaluations should be "standardized" or…

In 2016, the federal government proposed and adopted the Every Student Succeeds Act, which retracted the federal government's prior control over states' teacher evaluation systems, permitting more local control. Kevin Close, Audrey Amrein-Beardsley, and Clarin Collins collected information from states to determine the degree to which states were…

This manuscript examines value added measures used in teacher evaluations. The evaluations are often based on limited observations and use student growth as measured by standardized tests. These measures typically do not use multiple measures or consider other factors in the teaching and learning process. This manuscript identifies some of the…

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…

Teacher evaluation is at the center of current education policy reform. Most evaluation systems rely at least in part on principals' assessments of teachers, and their discretionary judgments carry substantial weight. However, we know relatively little about what they value when determining evaluations and high stakes personnel decisions. The…