Continuing Assessment of Teacher Reactions to a Standards-Based Teacher Evaluation System

Building on our evaluation of a field test (Milanowski & Heneman, 2001), the present study provides a description and evaluation of the first two years of district-wide implementation of a standards-based teacher evaluation system in the Cincinnati public schools. We describe the new system and changes that were made to it as a result of the pilot study. We then focus on two substantive research issues—the inter-rater agreement of classroom observations and teacher reactions to the new system. We found that carefully selected and trained peer evaluators provided ratings that showed moderate to high agreement with ratings by administrators. Teachers' specific reactions to the new system on several dimensions were found to be mostly neutral. Teachers' overall reactions to the new system, however, were less favorable. Based on these results and other research we make several suggestions for how to effectively design and implement a standards-based teacher evaluation system.