Schools' Advance: Teacher Evaluation in New York City

Abstract

Teachers in almost all states are evaluated differently, which has implications for the instruction that students receive and teachers’ continued employment. In pointing to the importance of cognition and context in understanding policy implementation, scholars have argued that the process of sensemaking may play a large role in determining the way that teachers understand the policy and the ways they implement it (Coburn 2005a; Rigby 2015a). Other scholarship indicates that the perceptions of legitimacy within an organization play a large role in determining how cooperative individuals are with the demands of the organization (Curtin and Meijer 2006; de Fine Licht et al. 2011; Sunshine and Tyler 2003; Tyler 2006a). This thesis seeks to join these two literatures in order to understand how the design and implementation of teacher evaluation policy affects how teachers interact with the system and their beliefs about its effectiveness. This thesis finds that principals can be grouped into two different categories based on differences in how they implemented the teacher evaluation policy at their school: those that are focused on professional development of their teachers (“professional developer principals”) and those that are focused on maintaining the morale and sense of community of the teachers (“community builder principals”). Teachers’ environments were also associated with large changes in the ways that teachers perceived the system, as would be predicted by the sensemaking literature. Finally, this thesis finds that transparency has a large effect on the perceptions of teachers. When teachers have a better understanding of the policy, teachers were more likely to focus on the detailed mechanics of the policy and how they related to fairness for teachers.