The state departments are trying to create a fair, credible and rigorous evaluation tool to differentiate the performance of teachers. The belief is that students will be more engaged in learning if we recognize the strengths of great teachers and provide professional development for teachers in need of assistance. Without fully understanding the implications of the new evaluation tool, I cannot be so bold as to say that it will or won’t be effective. However, through my thirteen years of teaching experience and having piloted the new evaluation tool in PA, I will provide some insights into what I have learned.

As described in the third article in this series, (Teacher Evaluation Part 3: What Makes Evaluation Systems Ineffective?), the call for a new evaluation tool stemmed from the need to address the disconnect between teacher evaluations and student achievement. Teachers were receiving satisfactory evaluations as students scored less than satisfactory on state standardized tests. The goal is to bridge the gap by creating an evaluation system to better understand the effectiveness of teachers.

Over the past three years, 36 states and the District of Columbia have introduced new systems for evaluating teachers, according to the National Center on Teacher Quality. Part of the reason for this is the availability of federal grant money from the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program. Prior to this, however, teachers across the nation were evaluated using basic performance reviews, which only served to label the majority of educators as “satisfactory.” As a result, new evaluation systems have been developed and implemented in individual states with the goal of using multiple measures to thoroughly evaluate teachers’ performance in the classroom.