State Implementation of Common Core State Standards: Evaluation of Teachers and Leaders
The Southern Regional Education Board is conducting a multi-year study of how 14 states are implementing the Common Core State Standards. Six individual reports are part of the “Benchmarking State Implementation of Common Core Standards” project: a summary report, plus five reports with detailed state profiles by topic. The topic of this report (one of the six benchmarking reports on CCSS implementation progress in 14 states) is Evaluation of Teachers and Leaders. This report provides state profiles on “how states integrate the higher expectations for student learning inherent in the Common Core within the systems’ requirements for continuous improvement of teachers and principals. Essentially, these profiles ask, what measures within state teacher and leader evaluation systems generate information that sharpens understanding of teacher and principal performance in terms of their implementation of, support for and effect on student learning of the Common Core?” (p. 1). The profiles found in this report provide a descriptive overview of each state’s efforts in this topic area. Information from these profiles was gathered from a review of publicly available information and interviews with department leaders.
This report’s description of 15 state systems for evaluating teachers and leaders is clear and descriptive. It calls out the states that have the most promising practices for evaluating teachers and leaders. With this information, other states can look at these promising evaluation systems as models for developing or refining their own state evaluation systems. This aspect of the report, enhanced by the fact that its findings are reported state-by-state, gives it utility beyond the scope of the states involved in the study itself.