The Teacher Wars (37 page)

One of the most frequent complaints I heard from teachers about classroom observation in Harrison District 2 (and many of the other school systems I've visited) was that consultants and other non-teacher observers had a poor understanding of curricular content and so failed to provide relevant feedback. Bringing respected teachers into these observation processes as peer coaches and evaluators can not only lighten administrators' workloads, but also greatly
increase teacher buy-in. To do that, accountability reformers and teachers unions are taking a second look at teacher peer review, the practice first developed in Toledo in 1981.

Bob Lowe, a thin, short man in his fifties, was a little jittery when he arrived at a drab suburban conference room at the headquarters of the Montgomery County Education Association, his union, on a rainy morning in June. He was there to fight for the continuation of a thirty-three-year teaching career.
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Lowe had to make his case to a panel of eight teachers and eight principals who had been selected by their unions and the county school district as expert practitioners. The panel had already heard from Lowe's boss, the principal of a large, diverse suburban high school. She had tried everything to help Lowe improve as a teacher, she said, even assigning one of her deputies to spend 60 percent of her day in his classroom. But he was disorganized—he turned his grades in late and lost student work. In class he lectured in front of the room, sharing anecdotes from history that often amused students. But he offered little sense of the lesson's objectives or what students would have to do to perform well on an essay or test. The teenagers lost focus and wandered around the room. Even his honors kids did poorly on final exams.

It wasn't easy for the principal to recommend Lowe's dismissal. He was a big part of the school community. Every year he hosted a cultural exchange with a Russian high school, whose students visited Maryland. “He is an extremely good person, a good man,” the principal said. “Students generally like him. He has a passion and deep knowledge of his content area. But he can't
teach
this to his students.”

The panel had also heard a report from Lowe's “consulting teacher” (CT), part of a fleet of peer coaches, one of whom Montgomery
County assigns to every novice teacher and to veteran teachers flagged by a principal for underperformance. Consulting teachers work full-time as coaches and evaluators for three years, earning a $5,000 bonus above their regular teaching salary, and then return to classroom positions. The report from Lowe's CT included an actual script from several of Lowe's lessons, and it didn't sound good. Lowe's directions to students were so vague that he had to re-explain one assignment three times. During a five-minute warm-up activity, he demanded the students' attention seven times. He spent nine minutes having kids rearrange their desks to transition to a new activity, and he allowed struggling students to evade participation in class discussions. At his coaching sessions, Lowe had attempted to explain away his poor performance by recounting family tragedies and medical problems.

By the time Lowe appeared to plead his case, the outlook was grim. He spoke about his love for the county's public education system, which he had attended as a student and where his own children went to school. “I never wanted to be anything other than a teacher,” he said. “I'm a third-generation teacher. My sisters are teachers. I don't know what I'd do if I weren't a teacher.” But it was clear that expectations had risen at his school and he hadn't kept up. Tracking student data had not been a demand earlier in his career, nor had aligning lesson plans to specific curriculum standards. His lectures were, in his own words, “ad hoc.” Yes, he admitted, more of his students were failing this year than at any time in the past six years. He seemed to blame the kids. “Am I unclear, or are they deer in the headlights?” he pondered. “Some kids are like that most of the time.” He demonstrated the terrified deer, stiffening his entire body and staring wide-eyed into the distance. In the end, he simply pleaded for mercy. “I just hope that I can end my career with some dignity.”

After Lowe's presentation he left the room. Since his principal was actually a member of the peer-review panel, she recused herself, as did another member, a teacher who had taught Lowe's daughter. There were fourteen judges left, solemnly perusing huge binders full of information on Lowe and his students, including grades, test scores, e-mails from parents, and photographs the principal had
taken of his messy classroom. How many of his students were classified as special education, the panel discussed? Had that made his job tougher? Lowe had been in peer review once before, five years ago. Had anything improved since then?

One young teacher on the panel seemed to have made up her mind. “I don't believe more support would help him,” she said. “He's not leading the students strongly enough. I see no strategies or methodologies for improvement.” A principal agreed. “He rambled on. If he teaches like this, how can there be clarity for students?”

In the end, the panel voted unanimously for dismissal. Union vice president Christopher Lloyd, a lanky middle school teacher, went upstairs to tell Lowe his career in Montgomery County was over. When Lloyd returned to the conference room, his face was drawn. But he gave the peer-review panel a pep talk. In Toledo teachers can remain in the peer-review system indefinitely, as long as they show some small amount of improvement. “That's not the philosophy of our system,” Lloyd said. Struggling teachers are owed at least one year of intensive coaching on lesson planning, the use of student data, and classroom management. But ultimately, “teachers need to be able to support themselves on their own.… We own this process, and it's something very important to us as an association. We have to be about protecting the profession, not just about protecting anything that breathes.”

Peer review has sometimes been portrayed as a sort of union front; a faux accountability plan labor leaders use to distract policy makers from demands to end tenure and use test scores to evaluate teachers. It is true that in Montgomery County,
a district of more than nine thousand teachers, only forty-one were dismissed or pressured to resign in 2013 through the peer-review process. At least eight of those were tenured teachers, including Lowe. These low numbers are typical of many of the older peer-review systems across the country.
Journalist John Merrow ran the numbers in Toledo in 2010 and found that the nation's first and most prominent peer-review system terminated 8 percent of first-year teachers annually, but only an average of two-tenths of 1 percent of tenured teachers, likely a much smaller figure than the true number of ineffective veteran teachers in the district.

In 2004 Montgomery County commissioned an outside report on peer review, which included a survey of principals. One of the questions the district wanted to answer was why so few tenured teachers per year were being put through the process. A number of principals replied that they were overburdened by paperwork and had missed deadlines for referring teachers. Others seemed emotionally reluctant to punish ineffective teaching, telling
researcher Julia Koppich, “It's gut-wrenching. These [teachers] are not strangers. You know their stories. They're not evil people.”

Koppich is not the only researcher to mention that principals seem reluctant to fire teachers. Economist Brian Jacob found that in the years after the Chicago Public Schools significantly reduced the paperwork burden for dismissing nontenured teachers, 30 to 40 percent of principals chose not to dismiss a single staffer. Why? It may be that principals fear replacement teachers will be just as bad as ineffective ones who are laid off. Kati Haycock, the president of the Education Trust, has heard another theory: “
Maybe the problem is that your best principals don't give up on a single kid, and they don't give up on a teacher, either.”

Supporters of peer review say it is a mistake to judge these systems solely on how many teachers they dismiss; rather, the ideal outcome of the process is helping a struggling teacher develop into an effective one. “The worst thing you can do is fire someone,” says Dennis Van Roekel, the former NEA president. “It means you've lost all of your investment in recruiting and training.”

Peer review is also criticized as too little concerned with student achievement outcomes. Montgomery County was initially denied Race to the Top funding because it refused to give value-added scores a fixed weight in its teacher evaluation process. But “data” was one of the most frequently spoken words in that June day of peer-review deliberations. In one case, a tenured pre-K teacher had adjusted special-ed students' learning plans without presenting supporting data to parents—a big problem. The panel voted to enroll her in peer review for the following year, to help her develop student assessment skills. If she did not improve, she could be dismissed.

The next case was of a nontenured teacher in a fourth-grade language immersion program. She was a native Spanish speaker in her
midthirties who had moved to Montgomery County after teaching in another Maryland district. Her principal reported that the teacher had increased the reading skills of her gifted and talented students by only 1.84 book levels—less than he thought was reasonable—and in math, test scores showed 26 percent of her gifted students had made no progress at all. In that case, after interviewing the teacher and looking closely at the principal's supporting documents, the panel chose to return her to the regular teaching pool. It turned out the teacher had been assigned an especially large class of twenty-nine fifth graders, including all of the grade level's special-education students, some of whose parents had requested her. She had worked successfully with one boy with selective mutism, a condition in which a child will not speak in social situations. That boy now participated in class discussions. “I'm really happy about that,” the teacher said. But she left the room knowing she had serious work to do on differentiation—making sure that her class is as challenging as possible for both special-education and gifted kids. She would have the opportunity to apply for tenure in the future, though there was no guarantee she would earn it.

Given the massive changes in expectations for teachers over the past decade—the requirement that they become technicians of measurable student achievement—it makes sense that many veterans need additional training. And the truth is that
few principals can offer struggling teachers the level of support peer-review systems are designed to provide. Historically, principals served as building and personnel managers while teachers made instructional decisions mostly on their own. At teachers colleges, “autonomy” in the individual classroom has been promoted as a key ethos of the profession. But when taken too literally, autonomy can create a situation in which classrooms are so-called “black boxes,” places impenetrable to outside observation or constructive critique. Now principals are expected to do their old managerial jobs and oversee instruction, too—what and how students are learning. That growing bucket of responsibilities is often an untenable load, given that the average American principal or assistant principal oversees twenty to forty teachers, compared to an eight- to ten-employee “span of control” in most other professions. Consulting teachers in Montgomery
County, Toledo, Rochester, and other districts that use peer review have caseloads of ten to twenty teachers per year—still a lot of work, but, unlike principals, they are focused 100 percent on improving instruction.

Peer review also offers districts the opportunity to reward the best teachers with mentor roles. And it can save money:
Replacing a teacher costs a district, on average, $10,000 in recruitment and training fees, while peer review costs just $4,000 to $7,000 per teacher served. Newer peer-review systems tend to be much more aggressive than the one in Montgomery County. In Newark, a new teacher evaluation process based partially on value-added has declared 20 percent of the city's teachers either “ineffective” or only “partially effective.” All low-rated teachers receive peer assistance and review and lose their right to raises for years of service. In Baltimore a landmark contract ended seniority raises for all teachers and instead moves teachers through a series of steps related to job performance, called standard, professional, mentor, and lead. Peer evaluators, who observe videotapes of lessons, grant teachers some of the points that move them forward in the progression. Other points are distributed by administrators to reward teachers for taking on extra responsibilities, like leading afterschool tutoring sessions.

In Saint Louis, tenured teachers flagged for poor performance have the choice to either keep or waive their tenure rights. If a teacher keeps tenure, she has only eighteen weeks to demonstrate progress in the classroom, after which the district can pursue a termination hearing. If a teacher waives tenure, she has a full year to work with a peer coach; if she improves, she re-earns tenure, and if she does not she can be dismissed by a panel of teachers and principals. All first-year teachers in Saint Louis participate in peer mentorship and review, with the goal of convincing more of them to stay on for that critical second year, when research shows teacher effectiveness takes a huge leap. Between 2011 and 2013, 7 percent of Saint Louis teachers were terminated under this system. Yet Randi Weingarten has said “
the powers that be in this country” should celebrate the Saint Louis Plan as a model of union-management cooperation.

Accountability reformers who once saw peer review as too soft on teachers have become more sympathetic to the idea, in part
because embracing the practice has allowed districts like Saint Louis, Newark, and Baltimore to negotiate huge concessions from unions on seniority. And the Gates Foundation MET study found that when teachers are observed by both principals and peers, observation scores are more likely to match value-added ratings than when principals alone do the observing. The MET project's concluding report had a peculiar circular logic, in which all teacher evaluation methods were judged according to how strongly they correlated with value-added scores. Given the Gates Foundation's longtime orientation toward measurable student achievement gains, that is no surprise. Yet another interpretation of the study's results is that classroom observations and value-added scores actually measure different elements of successful teaching, and thus should be used side by side even—perhaps especially—when they do turn up different results.