ADVOCATING A SUCCESSFUL POLICY FOR IMPLEMENTING STATE-MANDATED REFORMS TO TEACHER EVALUATION PRACTICES
This Policy Advocacy paper is the third in a three-part dissertation on the effect of new Illinois laws on teacher evaluation in suburban Chicago elementary districts. The Illinois Performance Evaluation Reform Act (PERA) of 2010, as modified by Senate Bill 7, was signed into law in June 2011 and contains provisions that take effect over several years. Beginning in 2012-2013, districts were required to move to a four-rating performance evaluation system and begin to use these rankings, instead of seniority, to make job-related decisions. In fall 2013, I completed a second round of the survey that I had conducted in fall 2011 for the first part of my dissertation, in order to measure whether teacher and administrator attitudes toward teacher evaluation had changed in two districts (Districts A and B) after a year of implementation. Results from this secondround survey are presented in this paper. In general, these results show that teachers and administrators in District A, which made more aggressive changes than District B did, are more satisfied with their new evaluation system and with the change process. The paper then takes this information, along with results from my Program Evaluation and Change Plan papers, as a starting point for advocating a policy approach that districts should take in order to implement changes in teacher evaluation so as to accomplish the objective of making evaluations more effective while maintaining credibility among teachers. This policy approach calls for a “whole-hearted” approach to reforming teacher evaluation practices, combined with a significant and pro-active communications effort to build
Teacher evaluation, Performance Evaluation Reform Act (PERA), Educational Leadership
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