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Effective teachers not only affect academic achievement but also a lifetime of success. Equal opportunity to access quality education is recognized as a fundamental constitutional right for every child in America, yet it is rarely actualized. Supporting the belief that teaching matters, school reform measures turn to focusing on ensuring access to effective teaching. The federal government, states, and districts, are proposing new teacher evaluation systems with inherently higher levels of validity and reliability that can more accurately and meaningfully assess teacher effectiveness.Comprehensive teacher evaluation systems (CTESs) use multiple-measures of teacher effectiveness (e.g. student achievement, personnel review, self-and-peer-evaluation, student feedback, etc.) that differentiate levels of teaching, for formative (improve teaching and learning) and summative (decision-making) purposes. As longstanding perfunctory evaluation systems are replaced by CTESs, discussions revolve around the "right" measures for inclusion. Using pre-existing data (teacher survey, expert assessment, classroom observation), from a three-year state funded Improving Teacher Quality (ITQ) science and social studies-history, urban middle school, professional development (PD) program, this study explores: the sensitivity of measures to detecting differences (within-groups and between-groups); relationships between teacher effectiveness constructs (and teacher characteristics and PD); and the extent to which depictions of teachers vary across different measures of effectiveness. This study takes a step in understanding what measures should be included in a CTES aimed a providing a complete assessment of teacher quality.Findings indicate low-to-moderate-levels of sensitivity in detecting differences and high-levels of construct score consistency within the expert assessment and classroom observation measures. Further, the validity and reliability of the teacher survey is questioned, eliminating it for consideration in a CTES. Teacher characteristics do a poor job predicting scores on teacher effectiveness constructs, while PD participation and use of instructional strategies moderately predict construct scores. Classroom observations provide a unique portrayal of teacher effectiveness and are strongly recommended for inclusion in a CTES. While comprehensive teacher evaluation systems take a holistic approach to evaluation, recognizing and valuing the complexities of teaching, connecting teacher performance to personnel decisions revolutionizes education. As we move towards identifying, retaining, rewarding, and developing effective teachers, the promise of public education is hopeful.

Objective: The biomedical/behavioral sciences lag in the recruitment and ad­vancement of students from historically underrepresented backgrounds. In 2014 the NIH created the Diversity Program Consortium (DPC), a prospective, multi-site study comprising 10 Building Infrastructure Leading to Diversity (BUILD) institutional grantees, the National Research Mentor­ing Network (NRMN) and a Coordination and Evaluation Center (CEC). This article describes baseline characteristics of four incoming, first-year student cohorts at the primary BUILD institutions who completed the Higher Education Research Institute, The Freshmen Survey between 2015-2019. These freshmen are the primary student cohorts for longitudinal analyses comparing outcomes of BUILD program participants and non-participants.Design: Baseline description of first-year students entering college at BUILD institu­tions during 2015-2019.Setting: Ten colleges/universities that each received <$7.5mil/yr in NIH Research Project Grants and have high proportions of low-income students.Participants: First-year undergraduate stu­dents who participated in BUILD-sponsored activities and a sample of non-BUILD stu­dents at the same BUILD institutions. A total of 32,963 first-year students were enrolled in the project; 64% were female, 18% His­panic/Latinx, 19% African American/Black, 2% American Indian/Alaska Native and Na­tive Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, 17% Asian, and 29% White. Twenty-seven percent were from families with an income <$30,000/yr and 25% were their family's first generation in college.Planned Outcomes: Primary student outcomes to be evaluated over time include undergraduate biomedical degree comple­tion, entry into/completion of a graduate biomedical degree program, and evidence of excelling in biomedical research and scholarship.Conclusions: The DPC national evaluation has identified a large, longitudinal cohort of students with many from groups histori­cally underrepresented in the biomedical sciences that will inform institutional/ national policy level initiatives to help diversify the biomedical workforce.Ethn Dis. 2020;30(4):681-692; doi:10.18865/ed.30.4.681