Pushing States to Develop Meaningful Teacher Evaluation Systems

A major reason why tenure reform has not received more attention to date is that most existing state teacher evaluation systems provide little useful information with which to measure teacher effectiveness.

As Bridget Curran of the National Governors Association observed, “there is tremendous interest at the state level today in improving teacher quality and compensation, but efforts to address tenure will not gain traction until better metrics for teacher evaluation are developed.”55 It is also crucial for the federal government to support state and district education agencies’ technical capacity to collect and analyze teacher effectiveness data and integrate it into a more rigorous teacher evaluation and tenure process.

For more information please see:

• Ringing the Bell for K-12 Teacher Tenure Reform by Patrick McGuinn