Results from year one of a pilot teacher-evaluation system in Chicago show a much broader range of ratings under the new system than under the district's existing one, with at least 8 percent of pre-tenured teachers receiving at least one "unsatisfactory" rating, according to a new paper out from the Consortium on Chicago School Research.
Although Chicago is not the only district putting a new teacher-evaluation system in place, it is certainly one of the few that's paying a lot of attention to implementation, studying it, and documenting the results. The system, based on Charlotte Danielson's Framework for Teaching, was rolled out in 44 schools in 2008-09 and expanded to 100 in 2009-10. The data here is from the first year of implementation and used "matched" observations to determine whether an administrator and external observer gave the same rating...