Alabama PEPE Program

PEPE Overview by Dr. Barbara Walters

For nearly two decades, an ever-expanding body of research has consistently indicated that excellence in schools is more directly related to the performance of their administrators and teachers than to anything else. School districts that implement strong performance-evaluation programs, linked with provisions and opportunity for strong professional growth and development, obtain marked improvements in educational quality. Educators do their jobs better; students excel both personally and academically and, as a result, community support for schools escalates proportionately. 

Acceptance of these findings and their promising outcomes was one of the primary factors that prompted the State Board of Education, in 1988, to adopt a resolution requiring the evaluation of all professional public education personnel either by a state-developed evaluation system or by one which each school system may opt to formulate pursuant to Board-established criteria. It also provided the impetus for the State Legislature, shortly thereafter, to enact legislation endowing the School Board’s resolution with the full force of law.

The Alabama Professional Education Personnel Evaluation Program (PEPE) addresses the above enactments and is the product and culmination of the intense, informed and dedicated efforts of the many educational practitioners who participated in its development. In many respects, the resultant approach is a salient departure from numerous other evaluative approaches currently in use in many school systems nationwide. Rather than focusing on personal traits, which may or may not relate to the quality of performance, the program concentrates on competencies and knowledge/skills which effective educators are known to possess, on performance standards, and on results. The evaluation program’s primary goal is the improvement of teaching and learning; and it seeks to effect growth, collegiality and assistance as opposed to dismissal or demotion.

Unlike some assessment processes, the Alabama Professional Education Personnel Evaluation Program is predicated on the belief that because classroom teaching and leadership and management processes in a school environment are extremely complex, multiple data sources and data-collection tools are necessary to obtain an accurate appraisal of professional practices and needs. And while no personnel evaluations are absolutely objective in the sense that they are completely devoid of supervisory judgment, the model used by PEPE does help to ensure that such judgments are not capricious and arbitrary, but instead are supported not only by reliable and valid data, but also defensible rationales derived through a structured process of data collection, interpretation, and inference.