Gates Goes to the Tape for Teacher Evaluations
Last week's big news came from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is investing $335 million to overhaul the personnel departments of several big school systems. A large portion of the Gates's investment will finance research by dozens of social scientists and thousands of teachers to develop a better system for evaluating classroom instruction.
Educators and researchers will analyze thousands of hours of videotaped lessons to identify attributes of good teaching and possible correlations between certain teaching practices and high student achievement, as measured by value-added scores, the New York Times reports. The effort aims not just to evaluate teachers on multiple measures of