U.S. public schools are in the early stages of a revolution in how they go about evaluating teachers. In years past there was little more than intuition and anecdote to support the view that teachers vary in their quality and, as such, it has been nearly impossible to discover and act on performance differences among teachers when documented records show them all to be the same.

A new generation of teacher evaluation systems seeks to make performance measurement and feedback more rigorous and useful. These systems incorporate multiple sources of information, including such metrics as systematic classroom observations, student and parent surveys, measures of professionalism and commitment to the school community, more differentiated principal ratings, and test score gains for students in each teacher’s classrooms.

This report, "Passing Muster: Evaluating Teacher Evaluation Systems," by Brookings tackles some of the tough questions that states and districts will face as they implement a new teacher evaluation model. Including: how a state or the federal government could achieve a uniform standard for dispensing funds to school districts for the recognition of exceptional teachers without imposing a uniform evaluation system on those district?  How can individual school districts benchmark the performance of their teacher evaluation system against the performance of evaluation systems in other districts or against the previous version of their own evaluation system?  In other words, how can teacher evaluation systems be compared, one to another?