The Obama administration's Race to the Top competitive grant program initiated an unprecedented wave of state teacher-evaluation reform across the country. To date, most of the scholarly analysis of this activity has focused on the design of the evaluation instruments or the implementation of the new evaluations by districts and schools. But little research has explored how "states" are managing and supporting the implementation of these reforms. This paper offers an assessment of how early adopter states' departments of education have undertaken the preparation and implementation of new evaluation systems. It also identifies challenges and lessons that can be used to guide future reform efforts in this area. This assessment of the activities of state departments of education is based on comparative case studies of six states: Colorado, Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Tennessee. These particular states were selected because they are "early adopters" in the area of teacher-evaluation reform and because their states and/or education agencies have undertaken different approaches to implementing the reforms. Two of the states--Tennessee and Delaware--were initial Race to the Top winners, while the other states won smaller grants in later rounds. Research consisted of a review of the scholarly and think tank research on state education agency capacity and teacher-evaluation systems; analysis of reports and data from the state education departments' websites and from organizations such as the Council of Chief State School Officers; a study of media coverage of the reform efforts in the six states; and 15 interviews with national experts on teacher-evaluation reforms and state education agency and local education agency staff in each state. Interviews are appended. (Contains 48 endnotes.)