Many States are Rethinking and Reversing Recent Teacher and Principal Evaluation Reforms
October 14, 2019
According to new research from the National Council on Teacher Quality, a majority of states have “backed away from recently enacted policies” aimed at overhauling teacher and principal evaluation systems since passage of ESSA in 2015, writes Laura Ascione of e School News. At least 30 states “have recently withdrawn at least one of the evaluation reforms that they adopted during a flurry of national activity between 2009 and 2015,” she writes. While these individual reforms varied somewhat state by state, they were overall “in response to compelling evidence that evaluation systems served no real purpose” and relied “almost entirely on subjective measures, rather than objective evidence” of how individual teachers contributed to students’ learning in the classroom. These policy reversals reflect ESSA’s fulfillment of “its pledge to return more authority to the states.”