Skills, productivity and the evaluation of teacher performance

We examine the relationships between observational ratings of teacher performance, principals’ evaluations of teachers’ cognitive and non-cognitive skills and test-score based measures of teachers’ productivity. We find that principals can distinguish between high and low performing teachers, but the overall correlation between principal ratings of teachers and teachers’ value-added contribution to student achievement is modest. The variation across metrics occurs in part because they are capturing different traits. While past teacher value-added predicts future value-added, principals’ subjective ratings can provide additional information, particularly when prior value-added measures are based on a single year of teacher performance.