Dissertation Writing Help - How Well Do Standards-Based Teacher Evaluations Identify High-Quality Teachers? A Multilevel, Longitudinal Analysis of One District

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States and districts functioning under the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation and state standards-based reforms are being measured and potentially sanctioned by their ability or inability to staff every classroom with a highly qualified teacher, ensure that all students make adequate yearly progress (AYP), and submit a plan to address inequitable distributions of teacher quality. All of this emphasis on teacher quality, combined with a general agreement among education researchers with various backgrounds about the importance of teacher quality to student learning, has generated a need for states and districts to identify teachers who are capable of helping students learn to expected levels. One such means of identifying teachers that holds some promise is standards-based teacher evaluation systems. Previous research using a two-level hierarchical linear model has shown that they are a valid means of identifying high-quality teachers (Milanowski & Kimball, 2005; Holtzapple, 2003).

This dissertation improves upon previous studies by using three years of data to analyze the effect of teachers with varying standards-based teacher evaluation scores in the context of a three-level model with controls for student-, teacher- and school-level characteristics. Results showed that the correlation between evaluation scores and student achievement were smaller in the three-level models than they were in the two-level models, suggesting that school-level characteristics play a role in determining how effective teachers are in facilitating student learning. Although the correlation is smaller, this study shows that standards-based teacher evaluation scores are still positive and (in many cases) statistically significant predictor of student achievement. This study also compares this measure to more traditional measures of teacher quality (education and experience) and finds that standards-based teacher evaluation scores are a more consistent predictor of student achievement. Results of school and classroom context variables are also discussed.