Better teacher feedback can happen outside of the evaluation process

Brookings Institute

Bu Matthew Kraft,

Over the last decade, nearly every state in the U.S. implemented major reforms to its teacher evaluation systems. These reforms sought to use evaluation for two purposes: 1) to inform personnel decisions, such as rewarding highly effective teachers and removing ineffective ones, and 2) to provide feedback to teachers to help them improve their practice. The idea was appealing—two birds, one stone.

But new evidence undermines that idea. A recent  study by Alvin Christian and me suggests that new evaluation systems have not been able to produce high-quality evaluation feedback at scale. Providing feedback to teachers is a worthy investment, but we suspect it would be more effective to focus the evaluation system on career decisions and provide the most formative feedback outside of the evaluation process.

Our research is the result of a partnership with Boston Public Schools (BPS) to study their efforts to improve the feedback administrators provided to teachers as part of the formal evaluation process.

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