One of our most important recommendations for improving teacher evaluation systems is that they be designed to provide meaningful feedback that can be used to streamline and target professional development. We can all agree that scattershot professional development is a waste of time and money. But as districts spend federal money to revamp and improve supports for teachers, how will they be accountable and prove that professional development is working?

The bottom line here, of course, is student achievement. But it could be difficult to untangle the impact of new professional development from other reforms, especially if that change is system-wide. Instead, it seems likely that districts would look for improvements in teachers - both in their self assessment and their evaluations.

That's a problem, because our current evaluation systems have a distribution that's skewed heavily towards the higher ratings categories. In order to differentiate excellent teachers from good teachers from not-so-good teachers, we need to shift the ratings curve so that teachers are distributed among different ratings categories - down the ratings scale, not up. If we ask districts to make this difficult correction at the same time they need ratings to go up to prove new professional development is working, are we setting ourselves up to fail?

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The Department of Education has released the reporting requirements states will have to meet to receive the second round of State Fiscal Stabilization Fund money, part of ARRA.

This is the biggest pot of education money in the ARRA, it is paid out using existing funding formulas, and it has the least amount of reform "bite." But the reporting requirements around teacher evaluation will get us a long way towards understanding the problem, which is critical to creating a national understanding of the urgency of reform.

You can read the new reporting requirements and take a look at the state application from this press release.