The purpose of this study was to analyze the use of reading strategies being implemented in an urban school district in the Southeast. This study was framed on the SIOP (Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol) Model (Echevarria et al., 2017). SIOP is an instructional framework that has been used in K-12 schools since the 1980s. It is a…

It is common practice for K-12 schools to assess multilingual students' language proficiency to determine language support program placement. Because such programs can provide essential scaffolding, the policies guiding these assessments merit careful consideration. It is well accepted that quality assessments must be valid (representative of the…

Research has long been clear that teachers matter more to student learning than any other in-school factor. Improving the quality of teaching is critical to student success. Yet only recently have many states and districts begun to take seriously the importance of evaluating teacher performance and providing teachers with the feedback they need to…

This report describes the implementation of professional development (PD) reforms and efforts to use teacher effectiveness (TE) data to inform PD through the third year of the initiative for all seven sites: Hillsborough County Public Schools (HCPS), Shelby County Schools (SCS, formerly Memphis City Schools), Pittsburgh Public Schools (PPS), and…

In this article, we explain how overly prescriptive, rigid state statutory and regulatory policy frameworks regarding teacher evaluation, tenure and employment decisions outstrip the statistical reliability and validity of proposed measures of teaching effectiveness. We begin with a discussion of the emergence of highly prescriptive state…

To improve the U.S. education system through more-effective classroom teaching, in school year 2009-2010, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced four Intensive Partnership for Effective Teaching sites. The Intensive Partnerships Initiative is based on the premise that efforts to improve instruction can benefit from high-quality measures…

Can districts and charter management organizations (CMOs) use contemporary ideas about teacher evaluation, management, and support to spark big improvements in student outcomes? To answer this question, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched the Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching initiative with seven sites across the country…

This document provides the final two appendixes for "Improving Teaching Effectiveness: Implementation. The Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching through 2013-2014" (ED580306). Appendix D provides detailed discussions of lever implementation for each site along with the detailed coded lever tables. Appendix E summarizes the…

This report highlights 10 of the most advanced and talked-about teacher evaluation systems nationally: Delaware; Rhode Island; Tennessee; Hillsborough County, Florida; Houston, Texas; New Haven, Connecticut; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Washington, DC (referred to throughout just as Washington); Achievement First (a charter management organization,…

In this article the authors provide practitioners and researchers with three illustrations of how to use systematic screening tools within the context of three-tiered models of support to (a) measure the overall level of risk present in a school over time and (b) identify students who may require more targeted supports in the form of secondary and…

Many existing teacher evaluation and reward systems do not capture variation in teachers' ability to improve student performance on standardized tests. Improved access to longitudinal data systems that link teachers to students facilitates the development of systems that incorporate student achievement gains into teacher evaluations. However, two…

As a research and technical assistance organization, CNA Education would be the last to deny the importance of good data and the first to applaud efforts to improve the quality and scope of the data available. Solid data are critical to CNA's mission to further general understanding of the efficacy of specific education reform initiatives and to…

Through a synthesis of test publisher norms and national longitudinal datasets, this study provides new national norms of academic growth in K-12 reading and math that can be used to reinterpret conventional effect sizes in time units. We propose d' a time-indexed effect size metric to estimate how long it would take for an "untreated"…

Since the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (2002), there has been increased interest in using student achievement data (through standardized tests) to evaluate teacher effectiveness. Two U.S. Department of Education secretaries, Secretary Spellings and Secretary Duncan, have expressed interest in growth models and the need to…

This report summarizes research findings and implementation practices for teacher and principal value-added models (VAMs), as a first step in the Team Pennsylvania Foundation's (Team PA) pilot project to inform the development of a full, statewide model evaluation system. We have selected 21 studies that represent key issues and findings in the…