In some Race to the Top states, too often educators viewed new educator evaluation systems as burdensome mandates whose main purpose was to fire underperformers – and many evaluators lacked the capacity to differentiate ratings and connect evaluation to teacher support.
We’ve long understood that student achievement is tied to teacher quality. And now, it’s becoming clear from both research and practice that teacher quality is directly related to the feedback and support they receive.
In the last four years, 30 states have transformed their teacher evaluation systems to improve student outcomes—and fourteen more are expected to follow suit by 2017. Too often, however, states focus more on the design of the systems than on...
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New York’s Board of Regents met to hammer out regulations for the state’s recently approved legislation to overhaul its teacher evaluation system. Pushed by Governor Andrew Cuomo earlier this year, the legislation called for increasing the weight of student test...
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In states that have adopted the national Common Core Standards teaching to the standards is required, it is just not clear what that means. The standards enumerate skill goals, but not curriculum, not specific lesson plans, and not approaches to...
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Education First helped Understanding Language—a field leader in strategies for English language learners—develop a strategy for disseminating its knowledge to more educators around the United States.
Education First and Public Impact are supporting a mid-sized urban district with a school turnaround model that puts excellent teaching and new teacher career pathways at the center of school redesign.
Education First helped design and launch EdReports.org, a new national nonprofit organization that is the “Consumer Reports” for K-12 education, starting with instructional materials.
In this series of briefs we provide an introduction to important areas for effective K–12/higher education collaboration and alignment. Each brief tackles a different issue: 1) Overall introduction; 2) Defining college- and career-readiness; 3) Adopting college- and career-ready assessments; 4)...
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In this brief we discuss the importance of aligning teacher preparation programs with the classroom experience in K-12 schools. Until recently, most preparation programs focused solely on inputs rather than how their graduates performed with students. Improving the standards for...
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