Since 2002, U.S. federal funding for educational research has favored the development and rigorous testing of interventions designed to improve student outcomes. However, a large proportion of the programs developed and rigorously tested in the past decade have shown null results on both student outcomes and, often, intermediate variables. In this paper, we argue for a more systematic approach to examining null results, and illustrate this approach via an examination of one program’s failure to impact teaching and learning.

This paper explores how state education officials and their district and local partners plan to implement and evaluate their teacher evaluation systems, focusing in particular on states’ efforts to investigate the reliability and validity of scores emerging from the observational component of these systems.

Surveys covering mathematical knowledge for teaching and teachers’ professional learning opportunities were administered to 461 middle school mathematics teachers in both 2005 and 2006. Results indicate that that teachers’ mathematical knowledge might have improved during this time period, and improvements may be linked to specific forms of professional learning. However, teacher-learning opportunities appear short and fragmented.

Drawing upon a teacher survey, this article proposes that successful instructional policies are themselves instructional: teachers’ opportunities to learn about and from policy influence both their practice and, at least indirectly, student achievement.