New York Magazine
“Education-policy analysts have known for a long time that the traditional system for hiring teachers — giving them tenure after a few years, and tying their salary to years on the job — does not exactly optimize the quality of the teaching workforce. In 2009, Washington, D.C., launched IMPACT, a new system for evaluating teachers that combined in-class evaluations with testing that compared student improvement against expected levels. Critics of the education-reform movement attacked it bitterly. ‘The overall impact of IMPACT is not only unfair but not likely to do the job it is supposed to do: Root out bad teachers,’ complained Washington Post blogger Valerie Strauss. The Century Foundation’s Kimberly Quick argued, ‘the studies are careful to only point out that teacher IMPACT scores rose—not to say that student performance improved.'”