A recent study by Kraft and Christian seeks to understand the relationship between the teacher evaluation system and teachers’ performance by examining the effects of sending administrators to teacher evaluation training programs in the Boston Public Schools (BPS). This study also focused on teachers’ perceptions of the new teacher evaluation system BPS implemented.

During the 2013-2014 and 2014-2015 school years, this study tracked 4805 teachers in BPS. There were 355 evaluators from 123 schools. 52% of evaluators were people of color, and most were female. The study sent out independent teacher surveys and independent evaluator surveys to understand teachers’ and evaluators’ opinions about the new evaluation system using questions answered through Likert scales. Anonymous annual BPS climate surveys to ask about teachers’ work environment were also distributed.

The results suggested that the majority of teachers felt the evaluations on their performance were fair; however, many teachers were less favorable about the quality of the feedback they received from the evaluators. Sub-analyses on perceptions of feedback quality yielded effects by tenure and race.  Authors suggest that to improve administrators’ feedback quality, administrators should make more meetings with the teachers to discuss the feedback they provided.

Source:
Kraft, M. A., & Christian, A. (2022). Can teacher evaluation systems produce high-quality feedback? An administrator training field experiment. American Educational Research Journal, 59(3), 500-537. 
https://doi.org/10.3102/00028312211024603