Teacher Evaluations: A State-by-State Overview and Lessons From Early Adopters

In advance of its 2011 State Teacher Policy Yearbook, the National Council on Teacher Quality offers a closer look into what is shaping up to be a critically important education policy trend. Across the nation states are engaged in create teacher evaluation systems to provide meaningful information about teacher performance, based in significant ways on student achievement, and tying information on teacher effectiveness to decisions of consequence about tenure, compensation, professional development and advancement.

With momentum towards performance-based teacher evaluation across the states, NCTQ:

• presents a detailed picture of the changing policy landscape across the states on performance-based teacher evaluation;
• highlights noteworthy state policies in performance-based teacher evaluation; and
• provides early observations on current challenges to building performance-based teacher evaluations in the states.