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Sector Spotlight
Report Release: Reforming Teacher Pensions for a Changing Work Force
New Education Sector report examines teacher pensions and details the problems facing current state pension programs.
Sport or Not? A Question for the Courts
Senior Policy Analyst Elena Silva interviewed by the New York Times on Title IX.
Teachers Unions as Agents of Reform
Brad Jupp, an architect of Denver's landmark performance-based teacher pay system, ProComp, is an outspoken advocate of both labor organizing and quality education for disadvantaged kids. In this interview, Jupp talks about ProComp, his views on teacher unionism, and the future of the teaching profession.
Education Sector Welcomes Three New Board Members
Education Sector's board of directors names three prominent leaders in the fields of education and journalism to the board: David W. Breneman, Richard Lee Colvin, and Peter McWalters.
For-profit colleges: Do they shortchange students?
Policy Director Kevin Carey comments on a recent Senate HELP Committee hearing on for-profit colleges.
Research and Reports
Education Sector Reports
Rush to Judgment: Teacher Evaluation in Public Education
- Authors:
- Robert Rothman
- Thomas Toch
- Publication Date:
- January 29, 2008
- Read more about
- Teacher Quality
The troubled state of teacher evaluation is a glaring and largely neglected problem in public education, an enterprise that spends $400 billion annually on salaries and benefits. Because teacher evaluation is at the heart of the educational enterprise —the quality of teaching in the nation’s classrooms—it has the potential to be a powerful lever of teacher and school improvement. But that potential is being squandered throughout public education today.
A host of factors—a lack of accountability for school performance, staffing practices that strip school systems of incentives to take teacher evaluation seriously, union ambivalence, and public education’s practice of using teacher credentials as a proxy for teacher quality—have resulted in teacher evaluation systems throughout public education that are superficial, capricious, and often don’t even directly address the quality of instruction, much less measure students’ learning.
In this Education Sector report, Co-founder and Co-director Thomas Toch and Robert Rothman of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform examine the causes and consequences of the crisis in teacher evaluation, as well as its implications for the current national debate about performance pay for teachers. And the report examines a number of national, state, and local evaluation systems that point to a way out of the evaluation morass.
Download "Rush to Judgment: Teacher Evaluation in Public Education."
Also read an excerpt of this report in a recent issue of the Annenberg Institute's Voices in Urban Education (Summer 2008). The edition focuses on teacher quality issues in education.
This research was funded in part by KnowledgeWorks Foundation and the William T. Grant Foundation. We thank the foundations for their support but acknowledge that the findings and conclusions presented in this report are those of the authors alone and do not represent the opinions of the foundations.
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Rush to Judgment: Teacher Evaluation in Public Education (448K)
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