Teacher evaluation has emerged as a key strategy for improving student outcomes in public education. The rationale is compelling: teachers vary widely in their effectiveness, and evaluation systems need to identify and address this variation. Performance evaluations have historically been largely perfunctory: no meaningful feedback is provided, no…

"Means to an End" is a practical toolkit for structuring the design process, elevating important issues, and identifying tensions and trade-offs that need to be resolved. The guide was conceived at a 2011 Aspen Institute workshop that brought together leading educators, researchers, and policymakers to share strategies for designing and…

Hillsborough County Public Schools has launched a teacher evaluation system that has attracted attention from educators and policy makers across the country. Centralized, collaborative, communications-driven and adaptable are key characteristics of Hillsborough's approach. The system consists of two main components: observation of instruction and…

After spending decades introducing curriculum and instructional programs with little to show in the way of student achievement results, the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS), under the leadership of Chancellor Michelle Rhee, decided to shift its focus. Emphasizing what to teach had yielded few results. Dogged by its standing as perhaps…

School systems across the country are working hard to fix broken teacher evaluation systems. This work offers the promise of regular, meaningful assessment of teacher performance. While this represents a significant advance, it is one part of a bigger picture: a teacher performance management system that links accountability, support, ongoing…

Teachers are the single most important school-related factor in students' learning, and improving student learning is the single most important goal at Achievement First (AF), a fast-growing public charter school network in the Northeast. To achieve this goal, the AF team has worked to establish a common understanding of effective instructional…

On September 2, 2010, the U.S. Department of Education announced the winners of the $350 million Race to the Top Comprehensive Assessment Systems Competition: the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) and the SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium (SMARTER). In his announcement, Secretary of Education Arne…

The standards-based reform movement has resulted in the wide-spread use of summative assessments designed to measure students' performance at specific points in time. While many have hoped that these end-of-year tests would provide constructional useful information for educators, they do not. This is not because there is something…

Significant improvements in student learning require real change at the heart of instruction: the interaction of students and teachers around the content to be learned. This paper suggests a set of design specifications for strengthening this interaction of student, teacher and content and increasing student performance across a school district.…

This year, Congress is scheduled to review the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). In 2002, this law signaled an important change in federal education policy by focusing on accountability for results rather than simple compliance and by seeking to set the performance bar high for all children, regardless of where they live. The time is now to learn…

Explores the concept of culture as a factor in the well-being of children. Holding students accountable for their behavior, holding schools accountable for activities and achievements of students, and inducing parents to support their children in school require a cultural change in how we look at schooling. (SLD)