Evaluating Teacher Evaluations
by Linda Darling-Hammond, Audrey Amrein-Beardsley, Edward Haertel, and Jesse Rothstein
(The Phi Delta Kappan, March 2012)
Practitioners, researchers, and policy makers agree that most current teacher evaluation systems do little to help teachers improve or to support personnel decision making. There's also a growing consensus that evidence of teacher contributions to student learning should be part of teacher evaluation systems, along with evidence about the quality of teacher practices. "Value-added models" (VAMs), designed to evaluate student test score gains from one year to the next, are often promoted as tools to accomplish this goal.
