Earlier this week Bellwether released an analysis by Chad Aldeman and Carolyn Chuong looking at the state of play on teacher evaluations around the country (pdf). It’s based on 17 states and DC. The punchline is that not unlike a few other issues there is a de facto conspiracy of hype happening here. Some advocates of improved evaluations and some public officials are touting changes that the data are not bearing out. Meanwhile critics (easily found on blogs and twitter) citing a teacherpocalypse clearly overstate what’s actually happening.

This builds on this earlier analysis that shows that the actual changes to evaluation schemes are generally different than the way they’re talked about publicly (pdf). For instance, the role of test scores, linkage to tenure and so forth.