A national survey of policies and practices regarding the performance evaluation of public school educators

Public school educators, both certificated teaching staff and administrators, experience great and ever-increasing public scrutiny in the performance of their professional duties. This study sought to identify policies and practices regarding evaluation of certificated educators in pre-kindergarten through grade 12 by analyzing surveys and documents received from 52 state education agencies (SEAs), including the District of Columbia Public Schools and the Department of Defense Education Agency during school year 1998–99. Analysis of the state education agency documents revealed that authority for educator evaluation in over 85% of SEAs emerged from state law. Among the SEAs, wide variation existed in policies and practices pertinent to performance evaluation for educators. Also, the study revealed a general lack of emphasis on training or orientation of evaluators, evaluates, or other evaluation system stakeholders. Finally, the documents analyzed provided evidence of limited and inconsistent SEA guidance in the use of evaluation standards comparable to the best practices recommended for personnel evaluation systems by the Joint Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation in The Personnel Evaluation Standards.