The federal government has spurred the creation of a new generation of teacher evaluation systems at the state level through more than $4 billion in Race to the Top funding to 19 states and No Child Left Behind (NCLB) accountability waivers to 43 states. A majority of states have passed laws requiring the adoption of teacher evaluation systems that incorporate student achievement data, but only a handful of states had fully implemented new teacher evaluation systems as of the 2012-13 school year.

As the majority of states continue to design and implement new evaluation systems, the time is right to ask how existing teacher evaluation systems are performing and in what practical ways they might be improved. This report helps to answer those questions by examining the actual design and performance of new teacher evaluation systems in four urban school districts that are at the forefront of the effort to meaningfully evaluate teachers.

Although the design of teacher evaluation systems varies dramatically across districts, the two largest components of these systems are invariably classroom observations and student test score gains. An early insight from this examination of district teacher evaluation data is that nearly all the opportunities for improvement to teacher evaluation systems are in the area of classroom observations rather than in test score gains.

Despite the furor over the assessment of teachers based on test scores that is often reported by the media, in practice, only a minority of teachers are subject to evaluation based on the test gains of students. In this analysis, only 22 percent of teachers were evaluated on test score gains. All teachers, on the other hand, are evaluated based on classroom observation.

Improvements are needed in how classroom observations are measured if they are to carry the weight they are assigned in teacher evaluation. The report’s authors make specific, evidence-based recommendations aimed at improving the fairness and accuracy of teacher evaluation systems. Key findings and resulting recommendations include: