Conversation Currents: Teacher Performance Assessments in Chicago and Beyond

This issue’s Conversation Currents is about teacher performance assessments. In the past few years, almost every state in the nation has implemented some form of performance assessment to evaluate teachers. This caused us to wonder, What can we learn from these early evaluative models? How are they taking shape? What can we do to improve them? What can teachers learn with them? The Chief of Accountability addresses these questions for Chicago Public Schools and a professor working with beginning teachers at a university. Both discuss the performance assessment systems that are emerging, as well as the related challenges and opportunities in the long historical context of teacher evaluation.