Measuring Teacher and Leader Performance: Cross-Sector Lessons for Excellent Evaluations

[pdf] A recent national push to use performance evaluations for critical personnel decisions has highlighted the shortcomings of our current systems and increased the urgency to improve them dramatically. This report, written with support from the Joyce Foundation, summarizes best practices and research from other sectors into six steps for education leaders who want accurate, reliable, and meaningful information about educators’ performance.

Competencies for Turnaround Success Series.

Public Impact has developed a series of resources designed to support school turnarounds. The series includes guides and toolkits that help select turnaround leaders and teachers based on the competencies–or patterns of thinking, feeling, speaking, and acting–that enable them to be successful in turnarounds.

Using Competency-Based Evaluation to Drive Teacher Excellence: Lessons from Singapore

[pdf] The complete recipe for Singapore’s educational success is not public, but one element stands out: the development and thorough use of performance-linked “competencies” to measure, reward, and develop teacher performance. This report, written with support from The Joyce Foundation, explores Singapore’s successful teacher evaluation and development system—recognized by its education leadership and teachers as effective and fair.

Performance-Based Dismissals: Cross-Sector Lessons for School Turnarounds

[pdf] In successful turnarounds, staff dismissals are typically small in number, and focused on employees who cannot or will not make the radical change necessary to dramatically improve performance. In this report, written by Julie Kowal, Jacob L. Rosch, Emily Ayscue Hassel, and Bryan C. Hassel, for the Center on Innovation and Improvement, we examine the research base on performance-based dismissals in other sectors to offer strategies for leaders in turnaround schools. A PowerPoint summary of the report is available here.

How Should States Define Teacher Effectiveness?

Racing to the Top on High School Teacher Effectiveness

[pdf] Achieve is a leading national voice for raising expectations for American high schools so that all students graduate ready for what’s next. To assist the 35 states in its American Diploma Project (ADP) Network, Achieve created a series of briefs on how states could use the U.S. Department of Education’s “Race to the Top” competition to advance their college- and career-readiness agenda. Public Impact drafted the brief on teacher effectiveness (pdf), providing guidance for states on meeting – and going beyond – the Race to the Top criteria.

Determining Processes That Build Sustainable Teacher Accountability Systems

[pdf] In late 2008, the Public Impact study team conducted semi-structured interviews with district personnel and state department of education officials who had participated in efforts to improve teacher evaluation systems. The study explores what processes are required to build sustainable teacher accountability systems in K-12 education.