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Evaluating Teacher Quality

December 17, 2007

To improve the quality of the nation’s teachers, the public education system has long relied on requirements and rewards for formal teacher education, experience, and other traits. However, policymakers and some prominent educators are increasingly embracing a radical overhaul, an ‘accountability strategy,’ that largely ignores these traits and instead rewards teachers’ measured contributions to student results. Douglas Harris argues that neither the traditional measure not a simple value-added-based accountability strategy is likely to best measure teacher quality. Teachers should be rewarded for a combination of experience, certain types of professional development, and teacher and school value-added.

See the paper, "The Policy Uses and Policy Validity of Value-Added and Other Teacher Quality Measures" here.