R. Barker Bausell, a biostatistician and emeritus professor at the University of Maryland School of Nursing, writes:

Of all the goals of the education reform movement, none is more elusive than developing an objective method to assess teachers. Studies show that over time, test scores do not provide a consistent means of separating good from bad instructors.

Test scores are an inadequate proxy for quality because too many factors outside of the teachers’ control can influence student performance from year to year — or even from classroom to classroom during the same year. Often, more than half of those teachers identified as the poorest performers one year will be judged average or above average the next, and the results are almost as bad for teachers with multiple classes during the same year.

Fortunately, there’s a far more direct approach: measuring the amount of time a teacher spends delivering relevant instruction — in other words, how much teaching a teacher actually gets done in a school day.

Read the entire editorial here.

Here’s an excerpt from the On Performance blog, written by Justin Baeder, a public school principal from Seattle.

As states start to roll out changes in teacher evaluation policy, the landscape for educators is changing rapidly. Race to the Top was remarkably effective in incentivizing states to restructure their teacher evaluation systems, and we’re starting to see how these changes are being worked out at the local level.

In a new series of posts, I’ll examine state and local changes to teacher (and principal) evaluation policy, and how these mandated changes are working themselves out at the local level.

Read the full post here and follow Justin on Twitter @eduleadership.

Jay Matthews writes for the Washington Post:

I have nothing but the highest respect for the authors of a remarkable new report, “Passing Muster: Evaluating Teacher Evaluation Systems,” just released by the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution.

They include Steven Glazermann of Mathematica Policy Research, Dan Goldhaber of the University of Washington, Susanna Loeb of Stanford University, Stephen Raudenbush of the University of Chicago, Douglas O. Staiger of Dartmouth University and Grover J. Whitehurst of Brookings.

They are among the smartest people in the country when it comes to figuring out how to measure what happens in the classroom and how to use those techniques to make our schools better. The member of the team I know best, Goldhaber, showed me personally how good he was at that when he was a member of the Alexandria, Va., school board, which I covered for The Post a decade ago.

Read the entire article here.

Stephen Sawchuck writes for Education Week:

Rounding the corner on the design of new teacher-evaluation plans, states and districts are beginning to wrestle with the significant technical and logistical hurdles for transforming their blueprints into reality.

In the coming months, more states—especially those that won grants through the $4 billion federal Race to the Top initiative—are expected to put out requests for proposals for such details as overhauls to the data systems that store student and teacher information; the provision of “value added” analyses of teacher performance; and the reporting and professional development that help teachers and principals use the information from the systems.

Read the entire article here.