This study examined the effects of the recently implemented North Carolina Educator Evaluator System (NCEES) on teaching practices and teacher leadership in a mostly rural county in the Piedmont region of North Carolina. NCEES is designed to improve teaching practices and teacher leadership through performance-based standards. This…

As of May 2014, all candidates for teacher certification in New York State must successfully complete the teacher performance assessment (edTPA). This article describes an assignment piloted in an early childhood literacy class as an embedded signature assessment and has three goals: to explain the context that led to the development of the…

To raise the bar for teacher preparation and evaluation, assessments should be based on how well teachers perform in the classroom, not how they are rated during principal-led classroom observations or on written licensure tests, a new report argues. "Evaluating Teacher Effectiveness," by education policy expert and Stanford professor Linda…

Federal policies (e.g., 2002 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act [ESEA] and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) posit that teacher quality is a potential leverage point for improving student achievement (U.S. Department of Education, 2010). Moreover, in the Race to the Top competition, teacher effectiveness must…

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), signed into law in December 2015, is the latest reauthorization of one of the most influential pieces of federal education legislation, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). The law had not been reauthorized since 2001 when the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) was signed, and ESSA is the result of…

This study describes how multiple-measure teacher evaluations were put into practice in a set of ten volunteering local education agencies (LEAs) in Arizona. After a key shift in state policy, five "pilot" LEAs implemented the new Arizona Department of Education teacher evaluation model in the 2012/13 school year, while five other…

The evidence that productivity varies greatly across teachers has given rise to the idea that student achievement data should be included in performance evaluation, despite limited empirical evidence on subjective evaluation or the use of objective performance measures in U.S. public schools. In this paper, we examine the results of a randomized…

This paper discusses the online Personal Learning Planner (PLP) project underway at the National Institute of Community Innovations (NICI), one of the partners in the Teacher Education Network (TEN), a 2000 PT3 Catalyst grantee. The Web-based PLP provides a standards-linked "portfolio space" for both works in progress and demonstration collections…

A 3-year pilot study of alternative assessments for over 500 beginning teachers revealed numerous possibilities, including high-inference classroom observations, semistructured interviews, structured simulation tasks, performance-based assessment center exercises, portfolios, videotaped teaching episodes, and revamped multiple-choice examinations.…

The development and pilot testing of a set of performance assessments to determine classroom teachers' measurement competencies in areas covered by "Standards for Teacher Competence in Educational Assessment of Students" (1990) are described. How the use of performance assessments in a graduate-level classroom-assessment course can…