Social and Emotional Type Inventory (SETI)
Category: Student Well-Being
Decades of K–12 education reform — much of it focused on teaching — have produced a persistent paradox: policies grounded in strong evidence disappoint when scaled, even as some implementations achieve striking success. Teacher evaluation is the clearest case. Cincinnati, Dallas, Chicago, schools in a teacher development experiment, and Washington, DC produced meaningful achievement gains, while forty-four state systems and a heavily funded, pre-screened seven-site demonstration produced little or none. The weight of the evidence indicates that teacher evaluation policy failed in implementation rather than design. Less clear is why. I explore the distinction between design and implementation and three complementary threats to implementation: limits of the mechanisms, failure to share responsibility, and failure to adapt; each made predictable by the political economy of education reform. Recent NAEP results have renewed calls for educational reform. Researchers and policymakers would benefit from understanding why earlier efforts produced disappointing outcomes, using these lessons to inform new initiatives.
Keywords
School reform, education policy, teacher evaluation
Education level
Document Object Identifier (DOI)
10.26300/e015-5789
