Prioritizing Teaching Quality in a New System of Teacher Evalaution

November 11, 2011

National Center for Teacher Effectiveness (NCTE) leaders Heather Hill and Corinne Herlihy  emphasize the importance of focusing on the quality of teaching, and not "teacher quality," in the following article published in the Education Outlook Series by the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research.

Teachers are the most important school-level factor in student success—but as any parent knows, all teachers are not created equal. Reforms to the current quite cursory teacher evaluation system, if done well, have the potential to remove the worst-performing teachers and, even more important, to assist the majority in improving their craft. However, the US educational system often cannibalizes its own innovations, destroying their potential with a steady drip of rules, regulations, bureaucracy, and accommodations to the status quo. Because that status quo sets an unacceptably low bar for teaching quality, missing this opportunity now means new generations of students may suffer mediocre—or worse—classrooms.

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Education Outlook No. 999 KB