Education reformers and state policymakers have rushed to enact new teacher evaluation policies. While changes in teacher evaluation are clearly needed, recent efforts have often paid insufficient attention to fundamental tensions in the design, implementation, purposes, and use of teacher evaluations, including trade-offs between local flexibility and centralized control, different purposes and uses of evaluations, and the role that evaluation should play in an evolving system. Ultimately, smart educator evaluation policies must be based in a much more nuanced consideration of what it means to evaluate teachers as professionals than is included in our current debates. By raising and discussing these trade-offs and tensions, this paper seeks to advance the debate on teacher evaluation.

The Atlantic -- Education policy has long featured two players—the government and teachers unions. But in recent years, a new generation of activists has stepped up to lobby legislators and drive the conversation. A rundown of worthy upstarts.

The Diane Rehm Show -- Chicago teachers on strike: How the union’s fight over merit pay and job security highlights a broader national struggle.

The Washington Post -- [W]hen Education Secretary Arne Duncan allowed states to set new performance targets earlier this year, Virginia, along with many other states, jumped at the chance. Unfortunately, rather than taking the opportunity to focus more on underserved students, the state took the stunning step of adopting dramatically different school performance targets based on race, ethnicity and income.