Developing Better Teacher Evaluation Systems
With many states passing merit-pay laws, finding a good method to evaluate educators is imperative. A new report from The Brookings Institution a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, says a way to accurately judge student progress, or a teacher's "value added," needs to be developed, and these systems need to be uniform among school districts. Many school districts that evaluate teachers currently put a 50 percent weight on principal or administrator evaluations of teachers, and the remaining 50 percent on teacher "value added," typically measured through student test score improvement.
I talked with Grover Whitehurst, director of Brookings' Brown Center on Education Policy, about states' decisions to revamp teacher pay and the future of teacher evaluation systems.
With many states moving toward merit-pay systems, is there a sense of urgen