ED released guidance for several components of the Stimulus today, including the Race to the Top Fund and the second round of the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund. Lots more on this to come.

Right off the bat though, the guidance contains a definition of "effective teacher" relevant to our current What is effective teaching?. The guidance says that

Effective teacher means a teacher whose students achieve acceptable rates (e.g., at least one grade level in an academic year) of student growth (as defined in this notice). States may supplement this definition as they see fit so long as teacher effectiveness is judged, in significant measure, by student growth (as defined in this notice). 

Chancellor Michelle Rhee is set to launch her new teacher evaluation system in Fall, 2009. Jason Kamras, a former National Teacher of the Year and potential "expert drop-in" for our discussions, has headed up the project.

The district is looking to hire 36 "Master Educators" to evaluate teachers. The requirements for the job are listed here.

The ability of the district to hire so many qualified applicants so quickly, and their ability to evaluate all 4,000 teachers in the district (that's more than a 100 each), will have important implications for our work.

Here's a post from TAPPED with some interesting quotes from Secretary Duncan. He says effective teachers "walk on water."

Elsewhere, Marcus Winters compares student data to crime statistics and wonders why teachers unions and legislatures are blocking the use of student data to evaluate teachers (h/t Joanne Jacobs).

Joanne Weiss, the ED official in charge of doling out the nearly $5 billion Race to the Top fund (part of ARRA), talked teacher evaluation at a recent panel in New York City (Gothamschools.org has the story). She said ED would favor states where student achievement was a "predominant" part of teacher evaluations, language that sounds straight out of the National Council on Teacher Quality's State Policy Yearbook. New York's laws prevent the use of student achievement data in tenure decisions, but there are lots of other barriers, like the practice of testing students in the middle of the year and the problem of untested grades and subjects, that make it hard to meet the "predominant" standard at the state level. In fact, only four states passed NCTQ's muster. Working through the details of using student achievement data is the next big challenge in the fast growing teacher effectiveness field. Here's hoping that ED leverages the stimulus money to figure out the how.