National Assessments of Teacher Quality. Working Paper Series, Working Paper No. 96-24.

This report discusses evaluation and measurement of the quality of school teachers, emphasizing the problem of assessing competence, performance, and effectiveness through large-scale national sample surveys. Part 1 outlines types of issues and questions surrounding teacher quality that must be addressed, highlighting conventional and new approaches to teacher assessment. Part 2 provides an interpretive and critical review of the predominant approaches to assessing competence, performance, and effectiveness of teachers. Part 3 offers an alternative, sociological approach to assessment. This view presents employee and organizational assessment as social phenomena, suggesting that all evaluation is shaped by social context, is value-laden and purposeful, and is based on particular norms of appropriate behavior. In this view, the role of research should be to uncover viewpoints, interests, criteria, and values underlying and shaping any particular theory and assessment method in order to illuminate its strengths and limits. The goal of research should be to help develop a range of complementary methods representing a range of viewpoints. Part 4 draws out implications of these approaches for large-scale national survey assessments of teacher quality. Part 5 lists sources and examples of existing survey measures of teacher quality (self-assessment, and administrator and peer assessment). (Contains 58 references.) (SM)