Bias found in teacher evals

The Brookings Institution's Brown Center on Education Policy analyzed four urban school districts as they attempted to create meaningful teacher evaluation systems using both observation and student academic gains. The May report stated that teachers have difficulty receiving top scores if they don't already have high-performing students, that observations by outsiders are more reliable than those by school administrators, that district size unfairly impacts a teacher's "student gain" scores, and that using academic gains to calculate "value added" by a teacher hurts good teachers in bad schools and vice-versa. Brookings made a number of suggestions for states attempting to implement evaluations, including adjusting teacher observation scores based on the demographic they are serving, having at least one observation each year performed by a trained outsider, and eliminating the value-added method (VAM) of teacher evaluation.