ABSTRACT
This chapter measures the teaching quality and the development of policies and practices in operational teacher evaluation systems. Critical to most systems is that they are based on a set of measures that results in quantitative scores that are intended to lead to objective measurement of teacher performance. Constituent teacher practice scores are also combined in different ways across states to achieve an overall teacher practice measure. The success of a teacher evaluation system will be determined by its ability to meet the two sub-goals linked to the improvement of classroom instruction and student learning. In an evaluation system, the inference would be that middle school teachers are substantially more effective than high school teachers. The Race to the Top initiative demanded that student growth models (SGM) be a central component of all evaluation systems, states have used varying combinations of student growth measures such as value-added models or SGM as well as student learning objectives.
