Drawing input from 3, 000 classroom teachers, the project highlighted several measures that schools should use to assess teacher performance, including test data, student surveys and assessments by trained evaluators.

WSJ: Bill Gates on the Importance of Measurement

Thirty three states have laws to measure teacher performance though most rely on test based systems in large part because they are cheaper.

FORBES: Bill Gates Says There Is Something Perverse In College Ratings

It's clear that systems that gauge student, teacher and school performance on standardized test scores put intense pressure on those results and inevitably tempt people to finagle them.

CNN: STORY HIGHLIGHTS

To qualify for federal funding, the state is forcing the city and other school districts to judge teacher performance based in part on student test scores.

WSJ: Thompson Proposes Plan for Teacher Merit Wages

It's also clear that there's much we want to know about student, teacher and school performance that cannot be determined from test results alone.

CNN: STORY HIGHLIGHTS

Union leaders also rejected the perfectly reasonable demand from the city of Chicago that standardized test scores play a role in evaluating teacher performance.

FORBES: The Teachers Strike May Have Been In Chicago, But It's Our Problem

The research, based on the US-wide National Education Longitudinal Survey, found that a teacher's gender had "large effects on student test performance".

BBC: NEWS | UK | Education | Male teachers 'better for boys'