Purpose

In the context of increasing national and global interest in teacher accountability systems that rely at least in part on measures of student achievement, school districts in the United States, much like their counterparts in other countries, have been prompted to implement policy-directed, although often locally-developed, teacher evaluation systems (American Educational Research Association (AERA), 2015; American Statistical Association (ASA), 2014; Amrein-Beardsley, 2014; Braun, 2005; Collins & Amrein-Beardsley, 2014; Harris, 2011). Such systems are based on the premise that teacher quality can be both defined as a construct and quantified for the expressed purpose of making inferences about the effectiveness of individual teachers as professionals (Weisberg, Sexton, Mulhern, & Keeling, 2009). The construct of teacher quality, its purportedly quantifiable domains, and the inherent inferences generated from its reification in policy and practice must, accordingly, be better understood in terms of their policy contexts.

The purpose of this study was to better understand the perceptions of teachers regarding the purpose, components, implementation, and impact of a new policy-directed teacher evaluation system. To do this, the researcher interviewed elementary and high school teachers in a large suburban school district in the United States and utilized self-narrative as a framework for understanding the “possible lives” teachers construct when telling their stories.

Perspectives

The need to recognize and understand the cultural embeddedness of current educational policies from a global perspective is paramount. Self-narrative as the construction of a longitudinal version of self through storytelling can be aptly applied to contemporary issues in educational policy (Bruner, 1991, 2002), including teacher accountability systems and the impact of such systems on practitioners in context. The cultural and linguistic determinants of self-narrative processes can wield power of their own by structuring experiences and organizing memories—in essence, one’s life becomes the narrative told (Bruner, 2004). In the application of narrative as a framework for teacher evaluation, the researcher recognized the fundamental importance of the culturally- and linguistically-bound “possible lives” from which teachers can choose when telling their self-narratives (Bruner 2004).

As discussed here, the “possible lives” reflect the “policy lives” in which the teachers are enveloped, specifically given the culture-laden and linguistically-bounded definitions under which they must operate when demonstrating their own effectiveness. In this case, teachers across the state were evaluated annually based on locally-developed systems mandated to include measures of professional practice (e.g., most often classroom observations) and student achievement (e.g., based on complex statistical value-added models (VAMs)). The preliminary findings in this study suggest that teachers construct self-narratives bounded in part by the policy-directed effectiveness label they receive as part of the evalution process (i.e., highly effective, effective, developing, ineffective). Teachers rely on these labels when choosing from “possible lives” that focus on their understanding of themselves as a good teacher. Understanding these “policy lives” was a preeminent focus in this study.

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