Race to Top Winners Feel Heat on Teacher Evaluations

Federal-grant recipients must live up to promises made in winning awards

Winners of the federal Race to the Top competition are facing difficult questions about how to make good on their ambitious promises to link teacher evaluation with student performance, a task complicated in some cases by resistance from educators and practical questions about how to judge job performance fairly.

For some states, that means wrestling with how to evaluate teachers in subjects for which no statewide test now exists. Others face a tough task of setting specific evaluation requirements based on relatively broad laws that established those systems, which in some cases were designed to boost the states’ chances in the competition.

Eleven states and the District of Columbia split $4 billion in awards through the Race to the Top grant initiative , which was championed by the Obama administration and financed by the...