This recent NY Times article (below) discusses a new initiative by the Gates Foundation to fund research and experimentation on improving the evaluation of teacher performance. Gates will invest $335 million, complementing similar new federal and private funding. The program will pay significant attention to value-added assessment models, which measure the direct impact of individual teachers on student learning. As the article notes, and in part due to the infusion of funding, value-added assessments are garnering increased attention and becoming fine-tuned through the use of video recordings that help identify those behaviors by teachers that lead to higher student learning, as measured by test scores.

Read the complete article here.