The Measures of Effective Teaching Project: An Experiment to Build Evidence and Trust

The Measures of Effective Teaching project has collected performance data using multiple indicators from over three thousand teachers across six urban districts. In the second year of the study, classes of students were randomly assigned to teachers in order to assess the impact of assignment bias on performance judgments. This article discusses the project rationale, design, preliminary findings, justification for the experiment, and details of the random assignment process. Results from the randomized trial will be released in a subsequent report. © 2012 Association for Education Finance and Policy