New York just released the results of the new teacher evaluation system it implemented. It's not strong enough, esp. outside NYC, but it's an important step in the right direction:

Nine out of 10 New York City teachers received one of the top two rankings in the first year of a new evaluation system that was hailed as a better way of assessing how they perform, according to figuresreleased on Tuesday.

The system, enacted into state law in 2010, was created, in part, to make it easier to identify which teachers performed the best so their methods could be replicated, and which performed the worst, so they could be fired. Although very few teachers in the city were deemed not to be up to standards, state officials and education experts said the city appeared to be doing a better job of evaluating its teachers than the rest of New York State.

In the city, only 9 percent of teachers received the highest rating, "highly effective," compared with 58 percent in the rest of the state. Seven percent of teachers in the city received the second-lowest rating — "developing" — while 1.2 percent received the lowest rating, "ineffective." In the rest of the state, the comparable figures were 2 percent and 0.4 percent.

"Two percent is worrisome," Sandi Jacobs, the vice president and managing director for state policy at the National Council on Teacher Quality, said of the number of teachers found to be "developing" in the rest of the state. The council has pushed for states to do a better job of identifying ineffective teachers.

Though the state did not release statistics for individual districts outside of the city, Ms. Jacobs said she would not be surprised if "some districts didn't identify any teachers at all as ineffective."

The new system replaced an older one under which, in most districts, there were only two ratings — "satisfactory" and "unsatisfactory" — and no real rules about how principals should assign them. Now teachers receive one of four ratings, based on a mix of test scores, principal observations and other factors decided on locally, such as student surveys.