Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

This paper explores the innovation and diffusion of modern teacher evaluation policies at the state level. In 2009, 12 states required student learning to be a factor in teacher evaluations. Today, every state either requires a student learning component or has plans in place to add such a measure. The conventional wisdom is that pressure from the federal government induced states to enact teacher evaluation policies—first to bolster their chances to win Race to the Top (RTTT) grants, and then as part of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) waiver process. Some of the backlash against that perceived coercion is enshrined in the Every Child Succeeds Act (ESSA), which cedes autonomy to the states to develop their own accountability plans.

While top-down theory about policy adoption has dominated the public narrative around teacher evaluation reform and appears to have influenced the language of ESSA, no one has yet examined the trend empirically. In our analysis, we hypothesize that the conventional wisdom may paint an incomplete picture of the momentum behind the surge in state adoptions. Specifically, we ask: What are the dynamics that drive states to adopt teacher evaluation policies?

To answer this question, we code state adoption year and district implementation year for each state and more than 100 of the largest districts. We aim to complicate the conventional wisdom about federal coercion by examining the extent to which school district policies are also contributing to state adoption. Earlier research on policy innovation and diffusion suggests policy entrepreneurs may attempt to scale reforms from the local to state level in the process of venue shopping (Mintrom 1997)—often through the influence of intermediary organizations (Mintrom & Vergari, 1998).

Descriptively, there was a close relationship between winning RTTT funds and adopting teacher evaluation reform—of the 19 RTTT awardees, only two had not yet adopted teacher evaluation reform as of 2014-15. Ten of the 19 had new evaluation systems in place prior to or the same year as their RTTT award. But another seven adopted reforms after their award year, suggesting the possibility that other factors drove adoption. During the RTTT application processes, states overwhelmingly adopted teacher evaluation reform before the first large school district in their state implemented a program. However, that directionality is less consistent after the RTTT competitions. Of the seven states that passed teacher evaluation laws after receiving RTTT funding, three already had districts that were implementing programs.

Our event history analysis suggests that while Race to the Top was clearly correlated with state adoption of teacher evaluation policies, other factors may also have helped to drive the trend. We find some evidence suggesting district implementation may have contributed to state adoption--especially in the post-RTTT years. The federal government played a role in downward diffusion of the policy, but we find evidence of diffusion upward from districts to states as well.