A Comparative Analysis of Teacher Peer Review Programs

in Four Urban Districts:

Professional Unionism in Action

Prepared for the 1998 AERA Annual Meeting

San Diego, California

April 13-17, 1998

Philip P. Kelly

250 F Erickson Hall

Michigan State University

East Lansing, MI 48824-1034

kellyphi@pilot.msu.edu

(517) 545-3248

This paper examines the development and implementation of peer review-based teacher evaluation programs representing the vanguard of a paradigmatic shift currently taking place within teachers’ unions (Kerchner, Koppich, and Weeres 1997). This study explores the ways in which teachers and their local unions reconcile competing criteria for legitimacy within the institutions of teacher unionism and professionalism through examining the phenomenon of union-sponsored teacher peer review programs. This area was chosen specifically because, where successful, peer review captures the quintessential conflict between unionism and professionalism. By identifying those practices and/or conditions which contribute to (or detract from) the successful establishment of teacher peer review, insight may be gained into the efforts of some local teachers’ unions efforts to reconcile the competing criteria of legitimacy.

Methodology

To examine this phenomenon, a multi-site case study was conducted to construct a comparative analysis of peer review-based teacher evaluation programs/policies as well as the districts and unions which support them. The methodology employed included a combination of qualitative and quantitative data collection procedures, including analysis of documentary artifacts for all such programs in the nation as well as site visits and numerous interviews in four representative districts. This particular approach met with past success when similar topics were explored by Johnson (1984) in her study of the effects of teachers’ unions upon schools, and by Cohen and Murnane (1985) in their mid-eighties studies involving districts in which merit pay plans had actually survived.

The school districts chose for this study were chosen according to the following criteria; age of program, programmatic features, national union affiliation, geographic location. The four districts upon which this study focuses include 2 NEA-affiliates and 2 AFT-affiliates and are located in four urban areas across the country with one each in the west and east, and two in the mid-west. The four unions represent between 2500 and 4800 teachers each, with a total representation of approximately 12,700 teachers.

The interview portion of data collection is comprised of interviews at each site including a representative of the superintendent’s office, the union president, a school board member, a peer evaluator, and an evaluated teacher. In addition to individual interviews, group interviews were conducted with teachers at each major level of schooling, elementary, middle, and high school. All interviews were both in-depth and semi-structured to facilitate comparison across interviews through a selection of common questions, as well as allowing for idiosyncratic data to be gathered through probing and allowing respondents to identify issues/occurrences which they deem relevant. The interviews involved 79 respondents, ranged in length from 30 minutes to 2.5 hours, and occurred between December 1996 and May 1997.

District Descriptions

The four districts examined are located in urban areas with a great deal of ethnic and economic diversity. Hayesville is a mid-sized city in the Midwest which enjoys a rather robust economy and is closely affiliated with the major university in the immediate vicinity. It is the largest city in the study with a 1990 census population of approximately 633,000. Since the implementation of their peer review program, the Hayesville Education Association has had only one president, who brought the concept of peer review to Hayesville. Five superintendents have served during this same period. The labor relations within the Hayesville school district have been relatively peaceful in recent years according to leaders from both the HEA and the district.

Fowlerton is also in the Midwest, but has suffered serious economic downturns over the past decade due to its dependence on the manufacturing industry. Fowlerton is part of what can be referred to as the "Rust Belt," and experienced a net loss of population through the 1980s. Over sixteen years, the Fowlterton Federation of Teachers (FFT) was led by the man who introduced peer review. After retiring in 1997, his wife was elected to the union presidency. During this time, five superintendents have served the district. Due to the great fiscal pressure within the district, the FFT has been unable to negotiate salaries comparable to their neighboring suburban counterparts. Instead, they have successfully negotiated teacher representation at almost all levels of decision making within the district.

Redland is a mid-sized urban center in the Northeast with a diverse, relatively stable economy and population. During the period of peer review, the district has had one union president and four superintendents. The Redland Federaton of Teachers (RFT) has been recognized for its innovative ideas and is often at the forefront of labor relations. When asked about the climate of labor relations within the district, it was often characterized as evolving from a "very centralized approach, very dictatorial" to one of cautious cooperation between the superintendent, the school board and the RFT (Aurelio Rodriguez, Redland human resources director.

Marine City is a large port city on the west coast and is both economically and ethnically very diverse. Three superintendents and three union presidents have served in Marine City since the implementation of peer review. Two factors are notable about Marine City. First, due to legislative action at the state level, the Marine City school district will lose $35 million dollars over a three year period. Data was collected in Marine City during the first year of this period during which they lost ten million dollars of funding. Second, labor relations within Marine City were often characterized as distrustful and antagonistic. Table 1 below displays relevant demographic data across the four districts

Table 1

Sites	Fowlerton	Hayesville	Marine City	Redland
City Population (1990)	332,943	632,910	516,259	231,636
% Change (1980-90)	-6.1 %	+12.0 %	+4.5 %	-4.2 %
% Minority (1990)	23.0 %	25.6 %	24.7 %	38.9 %
Median Income (1990)	$ 24,819	$ 26,651	$ 29,353	$ 22, 785
% Families in Poverty (1990)	15.4 %	12.6 %	7.4 %	21.1 %
Student Enrollment (96-97)	43,000 (approx.)	62,800	47,075	37,153

Programmatic Features

All four peer review programs were designed to serve the same two populations of teachers, people new to the district (interns) and those veteran teachers (interventions) who were deemed performing in a way so unsatisfactory that dismissal was likely if unchecked. All programs are coordinated by a joint governing panel composed of both union and district representatives. In Fowlerton, Hayesville and Marine City, the union representatives outnumber district representatives by one person. In Redland, each party has three representatives. To avoid union domination of any decision made by the panels, parties have either agreed to decide by consensus, or by a majority larger than that held by the teachers’ union. Table 2 below displays a brief overview of several major programmatic features.

Table 2

Districts	Fowlerton	Hayesville	Marine City	Redland
Union Affiliation	AFT	NEA	NEA	AFT
# of Consulting Teachers (CT)	16	13	12	80
# of Participants (1997)	180	210	212	246
Total # of Teachers	2500	4800	2900	2500
% of Total Staff through Program	50%	60 %	25 %	33%
Governing Panel	5 union/4 admin.	4 union/3 admin.	4 union/3 admin.	3 union/3 admin.
Cost	$ 500,000	$ 1,000,000	$ 700,000	$ 860,000
Leadership Stability	2 union presidents 5 superintendents	1 union president 5 superintendents	3 union presidents 3 superintendents	1 union president 4 superintendents

Some of the similarity among the characteristics listed above can be explained by the genealogy of program implementation across the four districts. Fowlerton has the oldest of the programs studied, being in operation for over fifteen years. Teachers and administrators from Hayesville visited Fowlerton when considering adopting a peer review program. Hayesville’s program in now over ten years old. Personnel from Marine City then looked to Hayesville when contemplating implementation of their program. Redland also examined Fowlerton as well as Hayesville, but substantially altered the fundamental structure employed in the other three cities. The structure of Redland’s peer review program will be discussed later.

Consulting Teachers

Implicit in the phenomenon of peer review, whether it be in teaching or any other endeavor, are the fundamental premises of expertise and trust. As represented in this study, teacher peer review is based upon an understanding that active teachers, knowledgeable in all that constitutes effective instruction, are better judges of professional competence than are principals -- who may not have taught regularly in a classroom for over a decade or more. Trust is also fundamental to the process of peer review. The public, as represented by the school board, and the district administrative staff must trust that the peers chosen as evaluators will effectively and consistently uphold a professional code of ethics and protect the interests of the schoolchildren. Therefore, attention will first be focused on the process by which consulting teachers, or peer evaluators, are selected.

Selection Process

Each of the programs is staffed by "consultant teachers" who are selected through a competitive application process from among active classroom teachers with a minimum level of experience (5-7 years). The application process includes the submission of four to five letters of recommendation from an applicant’s building administrator, department chair, and fellow teachers. After reviewing the letters, a governing panel of teachers and administrators interview applicants during which the panel gathers information about the applicants’ personal demeanor, communication skills, judgment skills. Often applicants are asked to role play or respond to hypothetical situations or written descriptions of a case of a teacher in trouble. In Fowlerton and Redland, actual classroom observations of the applicant’s teaching are performed. A combined list of the desired characteristics upon which applicants are evaluated include:

v Cooperative

v Discrete

v Leadership

v Outstanding teaching ability

v Extensive knowledge of management and instructional techniques

v Ability to work with adults and diverse groups

v Subject matter knowledge

v Ability to make difficult decisions

v Good communication skills

Typical Activation

In Fowlerton, Hayesville, and Marine City, the successful applicants become consulting teachers and may be released full-time from their classrooms for up to three years to serve as a consultant/mentor for interns and interventions. However, due to changes in demographics and shifting enrollment patterns, the need for consulting teachers within any given city fluctuates from year to year. In some cases, successful applicants may be accepted and receive the distinction of being recognized as worthy of being a consultant teacher, but may not actively consult immediately. In all four cities, some consultants are "inactive," acting as a body of reserve consultants to be activated when the need arises. When a consulting teacher is activated, the governing panel assigns a caseload ranging from 12 to 22 teachers with Hayesville having the largest caseloads, Fowlerton the smallest and Marine City falling between. Upon activation, consultant teachers receive additional remuneration of $ 5,000 in Fowlerton, $ 5,500 in Marine City, and a stipend of 20 % of salary in Hayesville. The length of activation for consulting teachers within these districts is limited to no more than three consecutive years after which they must return to the classroom. See Table 3 for summary data regarding consulting teachers in each district.

Table 3

Districts	Fowlerton	Hayesville	Marine City	Redland
Union Affiliation	AFT	NEA	NEA	AFT
# of Consulting Teachers (CT)	16	13	12	80
CT Release Time	Full Time/ limit 3 years	Full Time/ limit 3 years	Full time/ limit 3 years	1/2 or no time/ no limit
CT Compensation	$ 5,000	20 % of salary	$ 5,500	10 % or 5 %
Caseload Ratio	12 to 1	22 to 1	18 to 1	4 to 1 or 1 to 1
Interventions Weighted more heavily than Interns	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Subject Matter Match	Yes	No	Yes	Yes

Redland’s Program Structure

Redland’s program differs from that of the other three districts because of their insistence that their consulting teachers be actively teaching while consulting. Because of this, no consulting teacher in Redland is released from classroom instructional duties full time. Several informants in the Redland reported that this facet of the program greatly increased the "credibility," or legitimacy of their consultants in the eyes of both the program participants and fellow teachers. Because of the focus on maintaining close connections to the classroom and active teaching, Redland uses two different types of consulting teachers. The first is referred to as a "traditional mentor" who is released approximately half-time to consult, maintains a half-time teaching load and receives a ten percent stipend. Traditional mentors usually carry a total of four interns and/or intervention cases. The second type of consultant teacher is called a "site-based mentor," or "building mentor," who are not released from teaching duties but are given five per diem days of release time and a 5 % stipend in exchange for working with one intern in their building.

The Redland program also differs in that there is no programmatic limit on the time one can remain a consulting teacher. Because their consulting teachers are actively teaching while consulting, the program leaders report no need to limit teachers’ involvement in order to maintain identification with "normal" classroom teachers, or active classroom teaching. One Redland consultant teacher has been serving since peer review was established in her district -- nine years ago.

Autonomy and Oversight

Whether released full or half-time, consultant teachers in all four districts perform their duties relatively free from bureaucratic oversight. They are responsible for the allocation of their time and interactions with interns and intervention cases. This allows the consultants to adjust the focus of their time and energy as needed across the teachers on their caseload and throughout the year. Of this autonomous nature of the organization, Cathy Doane, a Marine City consulting teacher, commented that within the district, it was "the first time I was treated as an adult." Deanna Sirtis, a Redland consultant, further explains the significance to teachers’ newly found autonomy, saying

It's very fluid. I think that the exciting thing is that as professionals we get a chance to make some of those decisions (about) where your attention goes and how it goes. That's very exciting.

As the bottom dwellers of the educational bureaucracy, or "street-level bureaucrats," (Lipsky, 1980) teachers chosen to be consultants greatly cherish the professional freedom and license common to other professions.

To say that consulting teachers are autonomous is not to say that they are completely free from supervision or any bureaucratic responsibility however. Each district designed into its program mechanisms to provide a measure of oversight of the consulting teachers. All four districts require consulting teachers to make reports to the governing panels about the progress, or lack thereof, of the people on their caseload, what support they have given to their participants and finally a detailed justification of their final recommendation about the candidate. Fowlerton and Redland require program participants to evaluate their consulting teachers as well as their experience in the peer review process. Redland provides the most oversight of consulting teachers through formal evaluation of each consultant by a pair of members of the governing panel. Furthermore, each Redland consulting teacher is formally observed in the process of interacting with interns and/or intervention participants by panel members as well.

Recruitment of Consulting Teachers

Across the districts, program leaders reported difficulties in securing top quality applicants for consulting teacher positions. Members of the joint panels mentioned the reluctance of many teachers who are eligible to serve as consulting teachers to serve in this capacity because it would force them to leave their classrooms and their students. As Lortie (1975) reported over two decades ago, many classroom teachers gain their fulfillment out of the dynamic interactions of the teaching/learning process. From this study, it appears that teachers apparently refuse to forego the familiar intrinsic rewards for unfamiliar work that is seemingly detached from children. Teachers are thus either unwilling or unable to violate the cognitive institutional constraints of what it means to be a teacher. Aurelio Rodriguez, Human Resources Director for Redland observes

There are a lot of wonderful potential mentors out there who just don't want come out of the classroom, or who don't want to put in the time that's required to be a mentor. .... The question is are there more about there that would also make wonderful lead teachers? Yes, I believe there are. But you can't force them to apply if they don't have the desire to want to do that.

In Fowlerton and Marine City, this problem is addressed by "targeted recruitment" of master teachers as applicants for the consulting teacher openings. The leaders of Hayesville’s program responded to this phenomenon differently. After an initial group of consultant teachers were selected in the first two years of the program, Hayesville suffered from a lack of quality applicants. In response, program leaders decided to increase the stipend for consulting teachers by 5%. Given that Lortie (1975) and others have documented the importance of intrinsic rewards for teachers, it is doubtful whether Boss’ strategy of increasing the consulting teacher stipend by five percent will have the intended consequences.

Intervention Process

This section describes for the reader the typical process by which a classroom teacher can be recommended for intervention participation. There are many steps to this process. Please refer to the flowchart (Figure 1) on the following page while reading this section.

When a teacher is identified by either an administrator or a peer as needing assistance in the form of intervention services, the referring party usually informs the principal, the building committee and the program’s governing panel. The principal and building committee then meet to consider the merits of the recommendation confidentially. If the principal and the building committee support the recommendation, the recommendation for intervention then is submitted to the governing panel who reviews the recommendation. If either the principal or the teacher constituent of the building committee disagree with the recommendation, the teacher is so informed and continues teaching. At this point in the process, the candidate may appear before the panel to explain their situation in an effort to avoid intervention.

Upon reviewing the case, if the panel votes to accept the recommendation for intervention, they inform the candidate in writing and allow a five-day period during which the teacher may appeal the decision of the panel to an independent arbiter. Once a candidate is

Figure 1

Typical Peer Review Process

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accepted into intervention, the panel assigns a consulting teacher to work with the case. In Fowlerton and Hayesville, however, participation in intervention is not voluntary. If approved, the participant must participate or face dismissal proceedings.

Reasons for rejecting intervention recommendations usually relate to two circumstances. The first is procedural impropriety during the recommendation process at the building level, such as a person not working in a position for a required minimum length of time. Second, recommendations are usually rejected if the reasons for the recommendation are not related to classroom performance. In most instances, the reason must be directly related to classroom instructional practices of the candidate. Recommendations for teachers with difficulties following school/district policies, absenteeism, insubordination, etc., are often rejected. In some cases in which the teacher

self-recommends intervention in an effort solely to avoid being placed on probation. Many of these cases are rejected because it violates the purpose of the program and undermines its professional legitimacy.

Upon receiving the intervention assignment, the consulting teacher arranges for a meeting between the participant, the principal and him/herself in which specific performance goals are determined for the teacher and an informal timeline for improving is also established. In all the districts, but Redland, however, no terminal time constraints are established. The reasoning of program leaders in the three districts is that artificially imposed programmatic timelines are ill-advised because of the unique nature of each intervention experience. Harry Miller, president of the Fowlerton Federation of Teachers, summarizes their thinking well, saying

We don’t tell them how long they have to do it. ....It is strictly left to the judgment of the consulting teacher. We thought that through very carefully and decided that one of the problems with other kinds of intervention or assistance programs is that there are cut-offs. The consulting teacher should tell us what the status of that individual is and what kinds of problems there are and what kinds of help are being given. ....They are told that if there is a serious management problem that endangers the students, then you must do something quickly. We cannot allow a situation to drift if there is a physical danger to the students and everybody understands that. Other than that there is no timelines.

The Redland program however limits participation to a maximum of three complete semesters. By maintaining time limits, Redland’s program places the student’s need for quality teachers above that of job protection for a chronically substandard classroom teacher. The other programs appear to favor job retention. The manner in which district officials and union leaders approach the phenomenon of quality control among teachers will be addressed later.

All programs provide safeguards against possible misuse of the process by requiring agreement from both teacher representatives and administrators to place a classroom teacher into intervention. Hayesville and Marine City also allow for self-referral into the intervention process for those teachers that feel they could benefit from the interactions with a consulting teacher. For those teachers who refer themselves, their referrals go directly to the program panel for review. Once accepted, the process is the same for all intervention participants.

The Peer Review Experience

The Intern Experience

The experience of interns across the four districts appears to be very similar according to descriptions from consulting teachers, current interns, and former interns. As would be expected in any mentoring program, novices looked to their consulting teachers for a variety of forms of support. Chief among the forms of support utilized by interns were assistance with identifying and acquiring curricular resources, advice about classroom management, lesson construction and delivery, and finally help with acclimating to a new city/district/school and urban environment.

When examining the intern experience, it is useful to differentiate between novices coming into the classroom directly from certification or degree programs and experienced teachers who, for whatever reason, are new to the district. Understandably less experienced interns tend to make more extensive use of their consultant teachers around the issues of lesson construction and delivery, and curricular resources. New teachers are often intimidated by their more senior faculty members, as Michelle Sielski, a former Hayesville intern comments

As a first year teacher, you have so much going with lesson plans and getting a curriculum ready, it's so overwhelming. To have a person, to go to and say, "How do I handle this? What do I do?" on a friendly basis instead of feeling like you have to go to one of these teachers who have been teaching for 20 years. You feel kind of intimidated, to go and ask a lot of these little questions. You might feel like you're bothering them. Or they may look at you like you're asking something stupid or something remedial that you should already know. I think it is a really good thing especially for new teachers.

Ray Brice, a 27-year veteran teacher and current consulting teacher in Hayesville, confirms Sielski’s feelings of intimidation, revealing his own demeanor, and that of his colleagues, toward novices as a senior classroom teachers.

I think what a lot of teachers do, they'll help to a point but then they'll step back and say, "Okay, I've helped you do this. Now, prove yourself to me." And I think that's very common and I was very guilty of that myself, as a teacher in a building. Now, I'm ashamed of myself -- now that I'm working in this capacity.

In this context, the consultant can serve as a confidential mentor to whom novices can turn without feeling a great deal of intimidation or embarrassment.

The intern experience for those interns with prior teaching experience differ from those of inexperienced novices in two ways. First, experienced interns tend to be initially more resistant to being assigned a consulting teacher than were inexperienced interns. Once they experienced the help consultants could provide such as advice about where to find resources or about the local district politics and policies, they greatly appreciated the opportunity to interact with their consultant. Second, experienced interns tended to acclimate to their new classrooms more quickly than novices, and consequently often were reported to be successfully released from the various peer review programs more quickly.

Consulting teachers in all four districts work at trying to maintain a positive, supporting relationship with all of their interns. Once again, Brice offers useful insight, this time into the consulting teacher--intern relationship, saying

We don't ignore the difficult areas but it is a positive approach and an attempt to go ahead and bring out the positives in a teacher. We're providing some emotional support, too, because of all of the frustration of beginning teaching. ...One of the biggest things that we can do to help people is simply to listen to them and commiserate because they're experiencing this for the first time. We can let them know that they're not alone. I tell them, "It is very common for this to happen.

The emphasis on a positive approach and emotionally supporting the intern is also viewed as important by the interns as well. Earlier, in her study of Rochester’s (NY) Peer Assistance and Review program, Halkett (1988) documents that 89.9 % of the interns participating in Rochester’s program reported needing assistance with "moral support and encouragement" (p. 28).

While the vast majority of current and former interns reported about their intern experience and their relationship with their consultant teacher positively, four of the 37 interns interviews (10.8 %) reported significant difficulties with the intern experience. Three of the four respondents were elementary teachers who were very defensive to comments about their teaching styles. When discussing her intern experience, Hayesville fourth grade teacher, Barbara Hagstrom comments typify those made by other elementary teachers critical of their internship.

I think they didn’t think they took into consideration that people have different teaching styles. If you didn’t teach like your (consulting teacher) thought you should be teaching, then she’ll write you a note "Well, I think you should have done..."

But that’s my way of teaching! I don’t think it was fair to me to get notes like that.

No secondary teachers reported anything similar to these comments. An interesting subject for further analysis would be a differentiated examination by of teachers’ interpretations of their intern experience by school level.

The Intervention Experience

The typical intervention experience tends to be much more focused than that of an internship. Because the program participant in most cases has been identified as performing in a manner so unsatisfactory that dismissal is likely, consulting teachers work much more intensively with their intervention cases than with interns. Maria Rivera, a Redland consultant, describes the difference saying,

When you start with a new intern, I more typically will sit back and not intervene quite as quickly. I watch and get a sense for where this new teacher is in her or his development. With an intervention, you really have to really get to work right away so to speak. That was the difference that I really felt. You had to really sit down, ... find out where the trouble is, and develop a plan quickly.

The dynamics of the intervention experience also differ dramatically from that of an intern experience. Unlike their novice counterparts, teachers recommended into intervention have a history in their building which alters the approach consultants must take when working on intervention cases. Rivera observes in a typical intervention,

Typically when you go into an intervention, you've got somebody who's pretty battered by the time you get to them. They're feeling they've failed. They know that their job is on the line, if they're not successful. ...It's a real shaky situation.

Hayesville consultant, Ray Brice describes further the context in which many consulting teachers must attempt to assist teachers placed in intervention.

We go in understanding that there are a number of things going on. Number one, there are some emotional things that usually are part of being placed in (intervention) because of performance difficulties, so we do have to be attuned to that. There's a lot of embarrassment sometimes on the part of some of these people. There can be anger on many occasions. Sometimes people are hostile. We need to be aware of that in going in.

So demanding is the work required of a consulting teacher overseeing an intervention case that Fowlerton, Hayesville, and Marine City weight interventions more heavily than interns when calculating consultants caseload. In these districts, when balancing caseloads across consulting teachers, intervention cases are considered the equivalent of 1.5 or 2 interns. Because of the small caseload ratio in Redland (no more than 4 to 1), program officials decided not to differentially weigh interventions, but do address the added difficulty by only assigning interventions to experienced consulting teachers.

Further complicating matters, often faculty and staff members within a building often hold strong feelings regarding the intervention participant. Several mentors in across the four districts reported incidents in which they were approached by intervention participants’ fellow faculty members giving testimonials either defending the teachers in question or condemning them. Typical comments include

"This person should have been out of here five years ago. Why is this person still here? Get her out of here." Ray Brice, Redland consulting teacher

People come up and say, "That person is such a good person. They’re really doing a great job." I have a hard time because I can’t go out and say, "Look, you know, he does this, this, and this wrong in his classroom. He berates students." I can’t do that in a professional sense, so I have to ‘bite my tongue’ and say, "Well, thanks for your information." and leave it at that. Jim Carroll, Fowlerton consulting teacher

Carroll’s comment illustrates a common predicament in which consultants often find themselves. Because they are bound by the professional ethics of confidentiality, consultant teachers are prohibited from informing those teachers and administrators who attempt to sway their decisions about what actually occurs in participants’ classrooms.

More importantly however, the defensive reaction of fellow faculty members when one of their cohort is placed on intervention has important implications for this study. In this reaction we see an indication of the fundamental conflict between the solidarity required by the tenets of unionism and the emphasis on quality of practice required by professionalism. An examination of this conflict as well as a strategy for reconciling the competing criteria for legitimacy will be presented in the discussion.

Consulting Teacher Recommendations

Consulting teachers in all four programs are required to submit a final report regarding the status of the program participant, whether an intern or an intervention case. A typical final report includes the participants’ entrance and exit date from the program, a list of any goals established, a decision whether the internship/intervention was successful, and a documentation log of all interactions between the participant and the consulting teacher. In Hayesville, Redland and Fowlerton, the final recommendation of the consulting teacher to the governing panel, is usually the dominant factor in decisions regarding the future employment status of the program participant. A summative negative evaluation from a consulting teacher almost universally results in the teacher leaving the classroom, either through dismissal, retirement, or resignation. Even in cases of disagreement, consultants’ recommendations tend to carry more weight than building administrators’ decisions. Redland human resources director, Rodriguez puts the following question to people skeptical of giving consulting teachers’ decisions this level of importance, saying

Somewhere between 40 and 60% of new teachers were not getting their full complement of three observations and one evaluation. They weren't even getting that full contractual observation or evaluation. ...and that's probably the most you're going to get. In (our) program, a (consultant) has somewhere between 55 and 75 contacts and formal observations with their interns. Question to you is whose recommendation would you support? The one who has been in the classroom three or four times or the one that's been in contact with this mentor 50, 60 or 70 times?

On the rare occasions that negative recommendations are not heeded, the reasons reported by various panel members were procedural improprieties regarding recommendation into the intervention process, such as failing to meet a minimum time requirement in the participant’s position, or an improper vote by the building committee during the original decision to place the teacher in intervention.

Marine City’s program is unique in that although teachers engage in peer review and actively counsel negatively evaluated peers out of the profession, the Marine City Education Association (MCEA) designed their peer review process so that no direct connection between the program and final employment decisions exists at all. The executive director of the MCEA explains the necessity of separating peer review from official teacher evaluation by highlighting the history of distrust and suspicion in the district between administrators and teachers around issues of evaluation.

...the culture was lots of suspicion around evaluation -- anything that even smacked of evaluation. ..(the teachers) view evaluation in a negative sense. They don't view evaluation as something that's going to be helpful. That's a part of the culture that we're trying to turn around. Evaluation should be a helping tool as opposed to a "gotcha" but it's still, in an awful lot of schools, it's still a "gotcha" and our members view it as a "gotcha."

In so doing, she highlights the dynamics of institutional constraints shaping actors’ beliefs and actions within an organization. This point is further illustrated by the MCEA president who quickly corrected me when I referred to the consulting teachers as "peer evaluators," saying

They’re called consulting teachers. We’re real particular about that because this has nothing to do with the statutory evaluation at all. This operates separate from that. We are very careful to keep the two very, very separate because we wanted a program that was going to give assistance to people, to help them to fine tune their skills and then to help bring the new people along. If we tied it to the evaluation process which also gets into probation and possible non-renewal, then what it does it sets up a negative climate at this particular point with our members. So we’ve tried to keep it separate from the evaluation process. So we try not to use any words like "evaluation."

MCEA’s stance regarding peer evaluation is very significant with regard to issues of legitimacy and institutional change. Through this programmatic separation, the MCEA is emphasizing member protection demanded for union legitimacy, over that of quality demanded by professional legitimacy. As a result of this separation between the peer review program and formal summative evaluation, the effectiveness of the program, as well as its very existence, is being questioned by district officials. The significance of this arrangement will be addressed further in chapter six when addressing issues of professional legitimacy and quality control among practitioners.

Legal Challenges

The separation of consulting teachers from the overall population of teachers for supervisory roles is very significant. By doing this, teachers’ unions are violating one of the fundamental criteria for union legitimacy, equality among members. Although the Supreme Court in the Yeshiva decision, concluded that employees engaging in supervisory or managerial functions were omitted from collective bargaining protection, this standard has never been applied to K-12 education (444 U.S. 672, 1980). Because of the legally tenuous positions teachers’ unions find themselves in when engaging in peer review, it is important to examine legal challenges which have their genesis in these programs. All four districts and/or unions have been challenged legally as a direct result of decisions made in the various peer review programs. In Hayesville, a teacher recommended and approved for intervention refused to cooperate with the consulting teacher and physically barred the consultant from his classroom. This teacher was fired by the district for insubordination. The teacher then sued the district because he considered the insubordination charge to be an invalid reason for termination. The district and the peer review program were upheld in both the local court and an appellate court as well.

The teachers’ unions of Fowlerton, Redland and Marine City, each have been challenged by dismissed teachers for allegedly failing to meet their "duty for fair representation." In all of the cases, dismissed teachers charged that their unions, the MCEA and the RFT, did not adequately represent their interests or protect their "rights." In every instance, decisions were rendered that the union had indeed protected their rights through involvement in the peer review process. It was decided that the teachers were given ample assistance to improve from their consulting teachers but failed to do so. Therefore, dismissals were upheld and the unions’ actions defended.

Interestingly, in the Redland and Marine City cases, the local union refused to legally represent the plaintiff, a union member. In both instances, the unusual circumstance arose in which the state level union represented the local union’s member in a legal action against the local affiliate. John Denzer, RFT vice-president and chair of Redland’s program, describes the situation, saying

The district's attorney was questioning me. The union attorney was representing her and was also questioning me. It was a very unusual situation. Of course, our state affiliate does not like this at all. They think that teachers shouldn't have any role at all in doing management's work. ...We don't think of it as management's work. We think of it as ... protecting the profession.

The strange configuration of roles in the above description only further highlights the state of institutional flux, or paradigmatic shift, in which teachers’ unions currently find themselves.

Beyond challenges from terminated teachers, both the Redland and the Fowlerton unions were challenged by their administrative counterparts, principals’ unions. Upon implementation in Redland, Denzer reports that the principals’ union

filed suit against the district and the union claiming that teachers were being assigned responsibilities, particularly evaluation responsibilities that they were not qualified for and further they were not legally permitted to do in (the) state. That went through a couple different court cases which they lost. Eventually the judge in the Court of Appeals, which in (our) state is the highest court, said, "Not only is there nothing illegal about this but it may very well present a much better model for evaluating new teachers than the existing model."

The conflict in Fowlerton happened not during implementation, but much later in a most unusual turn of events. After successfully maintaining a peer review program for over a decade, the FFT canceled the program in a dispute with the district on what appeared to be an unrelated matter. The FFT filed a unfair labor practice charge against the district for bargaining over what it interpreted were teachers’ working conditions with the Fowlerton Association of Administrative Personnel (FAAP). The FAAP filed its first unfair labor practice chargre (ULP) against the FFT when they threatened to cancel the program. When the program was canceled, the evaluation of teachers fell back to building principals. Because of this the FAAP, filed a ULP against the district because they did not bargain evaluation as part of their contract, and therefore was not a required job function. Eventually, the peer review program was reinstated with the support of the FFT. At this time, the FAAP filed a third ULP against the district and the union for taking away their administrative function which also failed on appeal.

While the two conflicts described above may be the most dramatic, in every district initially significant resistance was reported by building administrators. Given that the teachers’ unions studied are engaged in institutional change, it stands to reason that the institutions with which teachers’ unions interact must also change (Goldring, 1996; Kerchner & Mitchell, 1988). Whether this change process is due to isomorphic pressures, or simply an adjustment to changes in the institutional environment remains to be seen. A careful longitudinal study of institutional evolution represented by the changes in these or similar teachers’ unions and their corresponding districts will most probably yield valuable insights into organizational analysis and the theoretical framework of new institutionalism.

Although it is possible to identify a fundamental design for peer review programs as typified in Figure 1, more interesting are the differences between the programs. The local institutional framework of the school district appears to shape both program design and implementation processes. Each district altered -sometimes significantly- programmatic features to be more congruent with the local context. To explore this mre fully, the process of implementation is addressed in the following section. It is in these differences of design and implementation that one can best observe the manner in which institutional constraints manifest themselves in the actions of individuals within organizations.

Multiple Goals of Peer Review

A fundamental question which must be addressed in a study of institutional change within organizations must by "Why?" Why would organizations as steeped in tradition and organizational myth as teachers’ unions incur the formidable transaction costs required when engaging in fundamental institutional change? Why would these unions even consider a concept like peer evaluation, which is antithetical to their traditional beliefs and policies? To answer this question, both union and district leaders were specifically asked, "What caused the union and/or district to consider peer review?"

An interesting pattern emerged from the responses to this question. Across three of the four districts, the responses revolved around one major impetus, public demand for accountability. Repeatedly, respondents, regardless of position, mentioned the public’s outcry for teacher and school accountability. As Redland school board member, Maureen George observes, often when, "The community is ... talking about accountability, ... that means getting rid of bad teachers." Thus the implementation of peer review-based teacher evaluation programs in Hayesville, Marine City, and Redland is meant to directly address the demand for accountability to the broader school community and general public.

In the fourth district, Fowlerton, the impetus for consideration of peer review came solely from the FFT president, Harry Miller, who was disappointed with the quality of novice teachers coming into Fowlerton. Ten years before the peer review program finally became a reality, Miller recalls that

The real trigger was the (State) Department of Education Committee on which I served. We were revising the standards for teacher education. I thought we ought to have a five-year training program. It was the frustration from not having any support down there.... After that experience, it suddenly occurred to me that we might not get five years of teacher training, but we had everything necessary to have an internship.

The impetus for Fowlerton’s program is thus unique by not emanating from public demands of accountability or union criticism which characterized the other three districts.

For this study, purposes of the programs are differentiated from the stimuli causing consideration of peer review in each district. While the press for accountability from both districts and unions may have caused leaders to consider peer review, in order to be acceptable to the various parties, the program had to serve purposes which were deemed beneficial. A certain amount of overlap may exist between these categories, but the use of "purpose" connotes a deliberative aspect to leaders’ actions and programmatic decisions that "impetus" does not. Unlike similar reports across roles within the districts about what caused the leaders to consider peer review, the purposes reported to be addressed by the programs varied according to the role of the informant.

Union leaders and teachers tend to emphasize the symbolic purpose of peer review as a means for teacher professionalization. A mentor teacher in Fowlerton describes the main goal of his program saying that FFT members want

to see teaching as being a credible profession as opposed to somebody just in there serving their time and working like blue-collar workers... (Fowlerton) is a blue-collar town. ...Harry’s (FFT president) been a real pusher to say that teachers are professionals and we should be treated like professionals in pay and respect. And we should act like professionals in getting rid of people who don’t belong with us.

Repeatedly throughout interviews, the phrase "policing our own ranks" was used to convey union members’ opinions that by engaging in peer review, they were taking "responsibility for the quality of teaching" in their respective districts (Executive Director, MCEA). By maintaining the symbolic goal of professionalization through peer review, teachers’ unions may achieve three things simultaneously. First, they counter criticisms of protecting incompetent classroom teachers by accepting responsibility for evaluative duties and recommendations for dismissal. Second, unions improve their professional status in the eyes of the general public and their own members by appearing to meet the professional criteria for legitimacy -- focus on quality and professional autonomy. Lastly, although not expressed openly by union leaders, by taking responsibility for quality among the teaching workforce, teachers’ unions may gain improved bargaining positions during contract negotiations.

District officials, on the other hand, emphasize the symbolic goal of providing quality education for all children as a way of empowering them within their urban environments. District leaders argue that by implementing peer review as a mechanism for establishing quality control and accountability among teachers, the overall quality of education will improve within their districts and the public’s demand for accountability will be met. Maureen George, Redland school board member, observes that

There is a great human cry for accountability. How do we make teachers accountable? ... Board members are really looking for the (peer review) program to do that. How do we make teachers accountable?

By emphasizing quality education as their primary goal, district leaders are able to maintain their legitimacy as an institution of democratic public education.

An interesting coalescence of the symbolic goals of the union and district becomes apparent when one tries to identify the supporting instrumental goals for both teacher professionalization and quality education. Specifically, they both fundamentally rely on a central unifying goal, improved practice, which is critical to meeting the criteria for legitimacy within professionalism and the evolving conception of unionism. Improved practice, in turn, is supported by three subordinate instrumental goals, improved assessment, support for practitioners, and reduced attrition among novice teachers. Below is a graphic representation of the various symbolic and instrumental goals mentioned during interviews and their relationships to the central goal of improved practice. Each of the goals identified is supported by the subgoals beneath it, with all of the fundamental instrumental goals (in bold) supporting the unifying goal of improved practice which then meets the needs of both local unions and school districts. At the bottom of the figure is the process of peer review which is used in these districts to achieve the instrumental goals.

From the literature regarding teacher evaluation as well as from interview data, two primary factors contribute to the perceived and actual failure of school districts to "get rid of bad teachers," -- poor quality of traditional administrative evaluations of teachers and teachers’ unions’ protection of incompetent practitioners (Bridges, 1992; Johnson, 1984). While some may prefer to lay blame more heavily on one aspect over the other, both have contributed significantly to the overall poor record of dismissing poorly performing teachers. A third, often overlooked, factor affecting the overall quality of teachers within urban districts is the lack of suitable induction experiences for novices in the profession of teaching which results in high attrition rates among young teachers. These factors are common across many of our nation’s school districts and were present in the four districts studied.

Figure 2

Relational Map of Multiple Goals

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Professionalization Quality Education

Consistently, throughout every interview, respondents reported that one of the main goals of engaging in peer review was improved assessment of teaching practice. Teachers, union leaders, school board members, district officials, and principals all reported that traditional administrative evaluation of classroom teachers and teaching were not effective in maintaining satisfactory levels of quality instruction and learning. The common principal evaluation of a teacher’s classroom practice is often solely based on a very short observation a few times per year. Typical comments about the lack of worth of such administrative evaluations include that of Rodriguez,

The superintendent ... indicated that ... administrators’ evaluation of teachers was not significant in the role of really identifying poor performers. Our own records review for a period of time showed that 99% of our teachers were all above average or superior -- which we knew was not accurate. So we ... invested in making a strategic decision to empower teachers to evaluate and assess new teachers to the district. (Director of Human Resources, Redland Public Schools)

Respondents emphasizing the inferior quality of principals’ assessments implicitly make the plausible argument that peer review as a mechanism for teacher evaluation can only be better -- it can do no worse.

Principals are also critical of the quality of evaluation and assistance they can offer their staff members. Due to the multiple demands of their jobs, principals report that they are unable to adequately evaluate and assist their staff members. Mary Jo Pillato, an elementary principal in Redland, when describing the intern portion of Redland’s program, reports that consulting teachers’ mentoring provides for her new hires a level of service that she is incapable of giving, because she is a principal with many other responsibilities. Respondents within various roles and across the districts echoed Pillato’s observation, often remarking that the job of being a principal precluded administrators from visiting classrooms long enough and often enough to adequately evaluate classroom practice.

In a secondary school with dozens of subject matter specialists, administrative conduct of teacher evaluations becomes even more difficult. Secondary teachers when referencing the goal of improved assessment very frequently pointed to the role of subject matter knowledge and subject-specific pedagogy as integral to quality instruction and quality evaluations. MCEA executive director, Patrick Kewin, describes principal’s limited scope of ability saying

Principals are no longer really the instructional leaders. I mean, they're not up to date on all of the instructional strategies and techniques. They don't have the repertoire that a teacher needs to have. ...The principal ...can come in and talk about relationships that you might have with kids, but in terms of understanding the instructional strategies, or the tactics and strategies that teachers need to use, the repertoire... This is one of the problems.

Mark Lawrence, a Fowlerton middle school science teacher, summarizes well the position of secondary teachers, declaring

An administrator can come into my classroom and tell me if I am teaching, using the proper techniques, but as far as the science -- no. ...So if I’m going to be reviewed, I want it to be by a science teacher.

The instrumental goals of improved assessment and support for practitioners are addressed not by the mere shifting of evaluation authority from principals to teachers, but by the change in the evaluation process within the programs. Rather than the much-maligned, traditionally quick checklist evaluation format used by principals for decades, within the peer review programs studied, the evaluator (consulting teacher) works much more closely with the practitioner, over a longer period of time, than in the former system. Classroom observations are greatly increased from contractual obligations of two to three occurrences per academic year required from administrators. When interviewing consulting teachers, the lowest number of observations reported was eight for an intern performing well in his/her classroom in Fowlerton. At the other end of the range is Redland, where because of the low caseload ratios, consultants reported observing teachers as often as 60 times. In Redland, it is very common for consultant teachers to visit program participants every week.

The second major impediment to "getting rid of bad teachers" is teachers’ unions perceived protection of incompetent teachers. Unions historically have acted as if quality issues were not within their range of responsibility (Atleson, 1983). Critics claim that teachers’ unions are no exception, often acting without regard for the quality of educational experiences provided for children. While all four districts reported similar criticisms from the public, the two NEA-affiliated unions, in Hayesville and Marine City, reported significant internal criticism coming from their own members.

The teachers were saying back to us is "We're tired of our union protecting people that are struggling or people that are incompetent. We don't want you doing that any more. Okay? We want to do something else here. We want to either help these people or help them leave, one of the two." (Kewin, Executive Director, MCEA)

One of the biggest criticisms that I took both internally and externally, ... was over the issue of evaluation and the fact that we didn't police our ranks at all. (Boss, Union President, HEA)

Such comments are reflective of the increasing delegitimation of traditional industrial unionism among teachers as union members. Furthermore, they are indicative of a general trend toward efforts aimed at establishing and meeting professional criteria for legitimacy within the occupation of teaching.

The third significant factor affecting the overall quality of teachers within a district, high rate of novice attrition, was reported in each of these urban areas. Across the four cities, respondents indicated that their respective districts suffered from a large turnover rate among their novice teachers. Thus, the districts and unions, both placed great importance on the support and retention of their best new teachers. Mary Brunnick, a veteran consulting teacher in Marine City summarized this point well, saying

We are getting what's called a brain drain. Within five years, 50% of our teachers, new teachers are leaving us. And they're usually, ... our best. So we tell them that ... Marine City has made this commitment to try to keep our teachers. This is one of the reasons why they put the mentoring program in place.

The intern component of these programs was reported to be a great comfort to participants who were inexperienced in either the district or city, by making resources available of which they would otherwise be ignorant.

So significant is this portion of Redland’s peer review program, that human resources director, Rodriguez, uses the fact that they have an intern program as a recruiting tool when trying to attract candidates. He describes Redland’s use of the intern experience, saying

Our mentoring program has been probably our number one magnet for attracting educators from outside of (Redland) to come to (Redland). ... When I'm going to Puerto Rico or the southern colleges ... to recruit African American educators, I tell them very simply, "Look around this room here. There are 180 districts, 350 recruiters, all trying to recruit the same 70 or 80 college graduates from southern universities. ... You go around the room and ... talk to the districts and say, "What kind of support am I going to get that first year? Formal support? Not that there's a helping teacher on the side of the building or the building principal will come in periodically. That's nonsense. I'm talking about real support: that's going to be in there 50 or 60 times during the course, going to mentor you, going to provide demonstration lessons, going to release you to go observe teachers that have good classroom management practices (or) strong instructional skills...

"We can offer that to you in (Redland) and we've consistently have been doing it and our retention rate of teachers is over 93%. ...Chances are that wherever you start to work is where you're going to stay. But you also need to know that within the first five to seven years, (there) is the high burnout rate for teachers when they get out of the profession because they didn't get support in the first year or two."

It’s a very successful recruiting tool.

While the other districts did not emphasize the recruitment aspect of the internship experience to the extent that people in Redland did, all districts were relying on their programs to curb attrition among novices. In the future, urban districts may implement similar intern programs to retain their high quality novice teachers and thereby improve the educational experience of their school children.

In only locale, Marine City, did comments deviate significantly from the overall pattern described above. Teachers in Marine City, as well as the district’s Director of Human Resources, reported that one of the purposes of their peer review program was to "protect teachers" from administrative discipline. The use of Marine City’s peer review program as a shelter for teachers is clearly evident in the report of Andrea Anderson, a Marine City elementary teacher.

the (consulting teacher)... was so supportive. She would just come and ... she'd observe me during my lessons. She'd say, "I don't see anything wrong. You're doing wonderful work. You're helping the children, you're supporting the children." She said, "If I saw a problem, I would tell you. But she said I don't see any problems." I kept her for the year. I even kept her for two years because I still felt under the old principal we had, I felt threatened a little bit...

While the teachers described this purpose in a beneficial light, the district administrator did not. From his vantage point, the Marine City peer review program was not upholding the professional standards and accountability espoused -- the professional criteria for legitimacy. Because of this, Marine City’s director of human resources was considering advocating the cancellation of the program.

Program Implementation

When engaging in institutional and organizational evolutionary change, implementation efforts are critically important to successful transformation of both collective and individual conceptions of "the way things should be." Therefore, this section is devoted to examining the implementation efforts in each of the districts. This will be done in a three-step process. First, I will concentrate solely on the implementation process in Fowlerton because it was the first district to engage in peer review and thus has a unique implementation story. Second, a synthesis of the stories of Hayesville, Marine City, and Redland will be presented together because their implementation efforts are very similar. This similarity is instructive when considering the larger population of districts which either are presently engaging in peer review or are considering it. Lastly, separate sections examining teachers’ and principals’ reactions to implementation are presented.

Having the oldest program, Fowlerton could not base their program on any preexisting model. As described previously, Miller, unhappy with the quality of novice teachers in Fowlerton, decided to establish an internship program, not for student teachers, but for teachers during their first year of employment. From this revelation, Miller proposed a intern plan in which experienced teachers (consulting teachers) mentored and evaluated novices. However, Miller’s original proposal met with harsh criticism and condemnation from building administrators in the district through their union, the Fowlerton Association of Administrative Personnel (FAAP), who viewed the proposed program as a turf issue. For nine years, the FAAP and central office negotiators rejected Miller’s proposal.

During contract negotiations in 1981, a new district negotiator, attorney Al Schultz, made the critical difference which led to the program’s acceptance. Miller explains the pivotal role Schultz played in implementation by highlighting the institution of professionalism within Schultz’ occupation, legal practice.

The school board had a new negotiator who was an attorney.... When we had this intern program on the table, we could never get it accepted.... But the attorney could understand a profession, and I could see that he was interested in how we were describing the purpose of the program, ... because it was really an effort to start a professionalization program. So he’s the one who got management to put it in place.

He ...came back to us and said "Can we use these consultant teachers to deal with more experienced teachers who were having serious problems?" That was quid pro quo.

The fact that Schultz was an outsider to the institution of public education, highlighted by Miller, supports the conceptual constraints within which workers in an institutional setting operate. As an outsider, Schultz was not subject to the same cognitive limitations that educators develop within their strongly institutional organization. Simply put, for workers within public education, teacher evaluation is not some thing teachers do. Within the traditional institution of public schooling, teachers teach, and administrators evaluate -- and never the twain shall meet.

Once finally accepted in 1981, Miller and Locke, the assistant superintendent, worked out the program parameters together. When the program design was completed, Miller and Locke traveled throughout Fowlerton explaining the program to teachers and parents in schools and other local organizations. Generally, the program received a warm welcome from staff members, parents and the local business community. After its first year of operation, the major Fowlerton newspaper endorsed the peer review program in its op-ed pages. Since then, the Fowlerton program has survived many fiscal challenges and often contentious labor relations.

In Hayesville, Marine City and Redland, the stories of implementation differ from that of Fowlerton, but are similar to each other. In each district, a concern about teacher evaluation and support started conversations between union presidents and superintendents. The union presidents had heard something about peer evaluation taking place in Fowlerton, or another city, and brought the idea to the superintendent’s attention. Unlike Miller and Locke, leaders in the other three cities typically took approximately a year to research the concept of teacher peer review and develop programs curtailed to particular local nuances. MCEA president, Pattra Tuckey describes the typical process, saying

The superintendent at that time was very excited about the idea. So they (organized a) joint committee, it was made up of central administrators, principals, and teachers selected by the association. They spent about a year doing research, and writing what they wanted the program to be and what they wanted it to address and basically what it wanted to look like.

All along we kept doing checks with our membership especially through the representative assembly about what was happening with the project. When they got the initial program written, we took it to our assembly and had people take a look at it, because this was in-between bargaining. When we finally took a polling of our members, we had a good 70% of our members saying "good, let’s do it."

While Tuckey describes keeping members informed through their representative assembly, Hayesville and Redland chose different avenues for informational dissemination. In Hayesville, rather than relying on representatives disseminating information, the HEA kept members informed constantly throughout the process through a weekly union newsletter. In Redland, union president Jerry Schlicker visited every worksite within the district to explain the program to teachers. Cognizant that peer review was foreign to the institution of public school teaching, union leaders took great pains to ensure that their programs would neither be improperly construed, nor be a great shock to their membership. Teachers’ reactions to these efforts will be explored in the following section.

A key component of any policy implementation effort is the manner in which it is presented to those persons charged with the responsibilities of changing their practice to comply with the new policy. McLaughlin (1990) made the observation that implementation dominates outcomes and that local will to implement policy changes is important to the success of such efforts. Therefore, it is important to examine the manner in which the innovative leaders in each district attempted to develop the will necessary to successfully engage teachers in a paradigmatic shift in their thinking about unionism, teacher evaluation, and the "proper" roles and responsibilities of teachers in issues of quality control among their peers.

Presentation of Peer Review to Teachers

Every union leader interviewed was cognizant that the vision of teachers as professionals embodied by peer review would be revolutionary to their members. Therefore, when garnering support for the peer review among teachers, union leaders took great care to introduce it not as "teachers evaluating teachers." Instead, they emphasized the issues of professional responsibility, new teacher induction, and support for teachers having difficulty. Miller, because of his interest in teacher professionalization, emphasized professionalism when approaching his members. Specifically, Miller recalls asking them,

If you have an experienced teacher in trouble and they need to be removed from the profession, whose responsibility is it? Is it management’s responsibility or is it the union’s responsibility? Eleven to one, they said "It’s the union’s responsibility."

Miller’s emphasis on teacher quality and the removal of substandard teachers --union members-- is indicative of his deep commitment to the professionalization of teaching for its own sake. Therefore, while not emphasizing teachers evaluating teachers, Miller does address head-on the notion of professional accountability for quality of practice and furthermore, locates that responsibility within the teachers’ union.

Marine City, Hayesville, and Redland, however, began their programs as a result of the public pressure around issues of accountability, not out of an intrinsic desire for teacher professionalization. In these cities, leaders emphasized the more supportive nature of peer review by highlighting the difficulties many teachers faced as either novices or troubled veterans under the traditional organization. Boss, HEA president, stressed for his members, the all-too-common lack of support and feelings of inadequacy experienced by most first year teachers, saying

We were losing a lot more (novices) because... there wasn't much support and they felt tremendously lost. Probably, the biggest selling item with our own members was saying flatly to them, "Do you remember what it was like when you were first year? What kind of support did you have?"

Union leaders in Marine City approached introduction of peer review to their members in a similar manner, emphasizing its supportive nature as well. As stated earlier however, because of an atmosphere of mistrust in the district, Marine City’s program is only supportive. It does not contribute to the official summative evaluation and dismissal processes in the district. The significance of Marine City’s union leaders inability to reconcile the competing criteria of legitimacy will be addressed in depth in the following chapter.

The creation of the consulting teacher positions necessary for peer review was the focus of Redland’s union leaders. The consulting teacher positions were looked upon as a means for professional development and career advancement in a manner very similar to some of the career ladder plans of the 1970s and 1980s. RFT vice president, Denzer explains,

In establishing this consulting teacher position, it provided an opportunity for teachers who didn't want to leave the profession to get ahead so to speak, which had been lacking in this district. I think it's still lacking in most districts. This program enabled teachers to stay in the classroom and still have additional responsibilities, receive additional compensation, and make a contribution to the profession.

This focus was further supported by the heavy emphasis given to professional development as an important aspect of the consulting teacher experience through several interviews with consultants in Redland. Regardless of how these peer review programs were presented however, teachers in the districts had to accept the idea for the programs to be successfully implemented.

Teacher Reaction to Implementation of Peer Review

Although union leaders took great pains to introduce peer review to their unions in the most conducive manner possible, one would not expect such a significant shift in the conceptualization of unionism to be accepted without challenge. However, the general trend of teachers’ reaction to the introduction of peer review programs is characterized best as skeptically optimistic. While the teachers interviewed generally disliked administrative evaluation of teaching practice, many were initially very unsure about the involvement of the union and fellow teachers in teacher evaluation. Susan Wallace, a Redland elementary teacher, succinctly encapsulates the predicament caused by the competing criteria for legitimacy as well as summarizes the prevalent attitude of teachers well, commenting

It's almost like a contradiction because we're employed by the union and it's supposed to be saving people's jobs but there comes a point sometimes when, if someone is having a really, really difficult time and they don't see it in themselves, for the sake of the kids, you have to step in. It's not an easy thing.

Most veteran teachers when asked about their thoughts regarding the respective programs in their districts responded favorably towards both the intern and intervention components, but especially liked the intern experience. Once again, Ms. Wallace offers useful insight,

I think (the intern experience) is a nice luxury because I started a long time ago... When I started, ... I went right into the classroom and it was a sink or swim situation. (I) cried for two months every night. I really think the intern program is excellent. The concept is wonderful and I wish I had been able to do it.

Given the stressful nature of one’s first years teaching, and the powerlessness of novices, it is understandable why teachers view the induction aspect of these peer review programs more favorably than intervention.

Not all teachers were initially receptive to the concept of peer review however. Ruth Tharpe, a Redland teacher recalls a faculty meeting during which the program was initially introduced to the teachers, saying,

I think a lot of people just weren't in the mind set yet in the schools. I mean that some of the people that worked on this in the beginning were very smart intellectually.... I think you have to give other people a chance to catch up with you.... I remember (John Denzer, RFT vice-president) coming to our school to talk ... and teachers practically threw things at him. He had been working on this and he didn't understand the problem. Because when you work on something, you already have it all ironed out. When everybody left that day, they were having a fit.

Union presidents in Hayesville and Marine City, similarly reported some opposition to implementation efforts. In both cases, critical teachers were characterized by their peers as being senior teachers who had "been through the trenches" and looked upon peer review as either "selling-out to management" or "as a way to "pit teacher against teacher." Across all four districts, however, resistance to the implementation of peer review was reported to be restricted to a small minority of the classroom teachers.

In three of the districts, the overall positive response of teachers to the programs was documented in union polls of their members when considering implementation. Fowlerton and Hayesville reported similar support of 92% and 96%, respectively. Marine City teachers supported peer review at a lower level of approximately 70%. Unfortunately, district and union officials in Redland never surveyed teachers individually about implementing their program. The Redland program was formulated as a memo of understanding between the district and the teachers’ union, then incorporated into the overall collective bargaining agreement upon which teachers voted and subsequently approved.

Principal Reaction to Teacher Peer Review

The reaction of principals to the implementation of teacher peer review programs was remarkably similar across the four districts. Uniformly, the majority of principals initially reacted to the implementation of teacher peer review programs with staunch opposition. In Redland, the administrators’ union went as far as filing a law suit against the school district because "they felt that (the district) was taking away their right, which was to review and assess teachers" (emphasis added, Director of Human Resources, Redland). Across the districts, comments regarding the principals’ initial reaction ran along the same vein. Typical comments included,

There was a fear that we were taking away some of their power. For some reason, administrators have viewed the threat of evaluation as a power base. (Jeffrey Boss, Union President, Hayesville)

Many were not real pleased with it because they felt as though somehow that was taking away part of their responsibility. (Mary Jo Pillato, Principal, Redland)

There has been resistance by some principals who see it as an erosion of their power. (Colleen Kiesler, Classroom Teacher, Marine City)

One of the main difficulties that arose was convincing school administrators that their authority as principals or supervisors was not being eroded as a result of us negotiating this plan. ...it was initially a real turf thing between the teachers’ union and the school administrators’ union on who was going to evaluate teachers. (Robert Locke, Assistant Superintendent, Fowlerton)

These comments represent a domino effect caused by adaptation of principals and their unions to the major change within the institutional environment of their respective school districts. Due to the interdependencies that develop as actors and organizations within societal sectors interact with one another, any major change on the part of one actor induces forced adaptation from other actors. From the above statements, one may speculate that teachers’ assumption of evaluative duties within schools removes from the principals the "latent function" of teacher evaluation as a mechanism of control and authority (Merton, 1957). Facing the loss of this latent function, principals understandably were initially resistant to implementation efforts in every district studied.

Among most principals, however, this resistance was short lived. As the programs were implemented and as the principals actually experienced having consulting teachers in their buildings, their initial opposition began to slowly dissolve. Universally, it was reported that the basis for principals’ support resulted from the tremendous demands upon their time. By relinquishing evaluation duties, principals reported being able to devote more time to other school matters. Principal Mary Jo Pillato describes the relief Redland’s peer review program provides for her, saying

I've enjoyed having the mentor program in the building because I know that the three first year teachers that I have are going to get daily assistance and advice and practical guidance that I could give, if I wasn't principal. But because I have so many other responsibilities, it helps me to have assurance that no one is going too far astray without support and guidance.

Pillato’s relief over the loss of evaluative duties was reported across all districts. Remarkably, when considering their initial opposition, principals eventually became among the strongest supporters of the programs, even lobbying for the retention of the Hayesville program when budget cuts threatened their program. In Fowlerton, principals asked the district and the teachers’ union to expand the program to include teachers for the first two years, rather than the first year only.

Peer Review as Quality Control

When considering if the teachers’ unions studied are actually upholding professional criteria for legitimacy, one must examine the effects of their peer review programs upon the quality of the teachers within the district. From the interview data and the documented rates at which interns and intervention cases are nonrenewed, it appears that consulting teachers are indeed upholding a higher standard of professional practice than did principals who failed to dismiss comparable numbers of teachers per year due to poor performance. The table below exhibits the rates at which both interns and intervention cases are not successful.

Table 4

Districts	Fowlerton	Hayesville	Marine City	Redland
% of Total Staff through Program	50%	60 %	25 %	33%
% Interns not Successful	7 to 8 %	5 to 7 %	5 %	7 to 8 %
% of Interventions not Successful	69 %	59 %	50 %	10 %

Unfortunately, specific numbers of teachers nonrenewed on an annual basis prior to program implementation were not available in any of the districts visited. On a general level, the vast majority of interview respondents reported that consulting teachers were more demanding evaluators than their administrative predecessors. Typical comments to this effect include "a peer teacher is more likely to make the tough call" (Human Resources Director, Hayesville), and "teacher consultants... (are) not afraid to make those hard decisions." (Asst. Superintendent of Human Resources, Fowlerton). Note that both of these comments were made by district administrators, not by union activists. This is not to say, however, that there were no criticisms or concerns expressed about the peer review programs effectiveness as quality control mechanisms.

Interestingly, when analyzing responses relevant to issues of peer review as a mechanism for quality control, an unanticipated division among the four districts arose. While strong supporters for the peer review programs were found in each district, strong critics were not as evenly distributed across the districts. The programs of the two districts with AFT-affiliated unions were described in a much more beneficial manner than the programs in those with NEA-affiliated unions. To most effectively relate the differences between the districts, each district will be described separately.

Hayesville (NEA)

The peer review program in Hayesville is based upon the premise that "good teaching is good teaching" (Boss, HEA president). Thus program leaders did not emphasize the assignment of consulting teachers by subject matter concentration to the program participants. The resulting mismatch of subject matter between participant and consulting teacher was the most commonly mentioned factor by all teachers interviewed, whether consulting teachers, interns, former intervention participants, or normal classroom teachers. It was universally condemned by all teachers interviewed. When told of the overwhelming dissatisfaction with the common mismatches, the president of HEA responded that due to the very late and unpredictable nature of the district’s hiring practices, the program coordinators cannot adequately effectively match program participants according to subject matter. Boss explains

...looking at it from our view of the panel, I can understand people out there feel much more concerned because they want to have somebody who's dealing with the same material that they're dealing with. But you see, we don't find that much of an issue tied in with their knowledge of their material. The only time we find that is when somebody has been completely misplaced in an area. Over 90 to 95% of the problems deal with management issues and developing things in the classroom and that crosses all of the areas.

Furthermore, several Hayesville respondents made negative comments statements regarding the rigor of the summative decisions. Of these comments, the observation most often made regarded the recidivism of interns who had successfully completed their internships. In a number of instances, interns who had successfully exited the program were later recommended for intervention as being seriously deficient. In a few cases, the necessary recommendations for intervention could not be made because the teacher had not been on staff the minimum of five years to be placed in intervention. Classroom teachers interviewed at all school levels reported instances similar to that below,

That individual was able to ... play the game, be different when the (consulting teacher) was observing them. Yeah, the teaching changed. You didn’t hear the degrading marks that you heard all the time from her when her (consulting teacher) was observing. (Elementary Teacher, Hayesville)

...the end result was the teacher is still teaching or was teaching and I wasn't so sure that anything had changed. The behavior of the class was still the same. The lack of instruction that was taking place was still very low. It was easy for the teacher to prepare for the day the (consulting teacher) coming in. It's almost like if they're on intervention, that (consulting teacher) needs to be there every day. For a long period of time to see what long term is happening. (High School Teacher, Hayesville)

Others blamed the recidivism of interns on principals’ unwillingness to agree with recommendations for nonrenewal or intervention. Two reasons were given by informants for principals’ reluctance, high principal turnover constantly started the administrative evaluation over again, and discomfort of the principal to recommend based on an inadequate number of observations.

The significance of the conditions described above becomes readily apparent when one considers the observation of Gerri Jackson, Hayesville Director of Human Resources. Although she is a strong critic of the recidivism and apparent lack of high performance standards, Jackson still remarks

I think that in terms of the outcome, a peer teacher is more likely to make the tough call. I have found that in both districts that the principals were a little bit more hesitant to make the difficult call and to basically terminate a person. (emphasis added)

Even though several informants mentioned a lack of rigor within Hayesville’s program, it was still generally reported that consultant teachers were more rigorous evaluators than principals. The belief that consulting teachers would be more likely to recommend dismissal of a fellow teacher than a principal was reported in every district, except Marine City.

Marine City (NEA)

The Marine City Education Association designed their peer review program to be completely disconnected from formal summative evaluation procedures. Thus, the MCEA program does not officially contribute to the possible dismissal of a teacher. This factor has resulted in the questioning of the program’s continued existence. Rather than a consulting teacher’s negative evaluation leading directly toward dismissal proceedings, in Marine City, the negative exit is merely noted in the teacher’s personnel file. The impetus to place a teacher on probation and document the teacher’s deficiencies is solely the responsibility of the building administrator. If that administrator does not take action, the teacher remains in the classroom with children, teaching poorly. MCEA President, Tuckey when commenting on this phenomenon, places the responsibility for removing substandard teachers squarely upon the shoulders of school principals.

...several teachers (whom) we have unsuccessfully exited from the program, they are still teaching in school. The principals have not bothered to take the time to put them on probation. We know that they are still doing a lousy job but the principal hasn't taken up the job to do that. It's still the responsibility of the principal to do that. In fact, in two cases, the principal had been on the panel and he still hasn't done his job. (emphasis added, MCEA President, Marine City)

Tuckey’s statement indicates the strength of the cognitive constraints within which members of highly institutional organizations view their world. Even while pursuing a program geared toward teacher professionalization, the union president in Marine City is unable to see the contradictory nature of her organization’s position. Because of the MCEA’s refusal to "police their own," they clearly fail to uphold the professional criterion for legitimacy of quality control.

However, if the principal does move to dismiss the teacher following participation in Marine City’s peer review program, according the former Director of Human Resources, Aurelio Rodriguez, the fact that the teacher had been through the peer review process contributes greatly to the arbitration hearing process.

We had much better success in those hearings with the documentation that we developed as a result of the (peer review) program. I don't think we've lost a (peer review)-based non-renewal yet ... because people see the documentation and all the help they've been given. So that clears up one major hurdle for the hearing examiner -- "Has this person been given enough help to overcome their deficiencies?" And when they see how many visits in the log, they usually (have) no sympathy for them, or very little anyway.

Therefore, even though the peer review program and the process for dismissal are kept separate officially, the district still reaps the benefit of the consulting teachers’ work in mentoring and evaluating teacher performance. However, these benefits do not accrue to the MCEA, who through their insistence on separation have apparently chosen to place protection of all members, a criterion for union legitimacy above the professional criterion for legitimacy, quality control. Because of the increasing emphasis within the public arena on issues of accountability within education, the MCEA’s actions will only further delegitimate their organization in the community.

Fowlerton (AFT)

Over the 15 years of its existence, the Fowlerton peer review program has managed to maintain a level of respect and credibility among both union supporters and district administrators. The complaints of recidivism and inappropriate union protection which were raised in Marine City and Hayesville are not present in Fowlerton. Throughout the district, regardless of position, people consistently reported that the consulting teachers were tougher evaluators than the principals. Director of Human Resources for Fowlerton, Robert Locke, notes

Teacher consultants--their colleagues--are harder on the interns than the principals were. Normally in the past what you would find is that principals have a tendency to give more "outstanding" ratings. ...But you're going to find that teachers are harder on their colleagues than are building administrators and incidentally, not afraid to make recommendations regarding dismissals.

Regarding recidivism of interns, Fowlerton has only had two interns recommended for intervention years later. When one considers that slightly over half of the teachers in Fowlerton (approx. 1300) were inducted through the intern program, the lack of recidivism is impressive.

The merit of Fowlerton’s program was recently validated through an unusual and unfortunate turn of events. Due to labor relations problems arising between the teachers’ union, the principals’ union and district officials, the Fowlerton peer review program was canceled for an entire school year. During this time, school administrators resumed evaluation of the teaching staff. As a result of their evaluations, not a single teacher -- either novice or veteran -- was dismissed. Ironically through its absence, compelling evidence arises that the Fowlerton peer review program is fulfilling the criterion of quality required by professionalism and public calls for accountability. The fact that the Fowlerton Federation of Teachers canceled the program however, raises valid questions about the teachers’ union internalization of quality control as a legitimate union function. This only further highlights the often contradictory nature of the competing criteria for legitimacy in which unions find themselves.

Redland (AFT)

Like Fowlerton, Redland has also been able to maintain a peer review program which is consistently regarded as credible and effective. The Redland program has never had a case of recidivism, nor would they support the placement of a former intern back into intervention. When asked about recidivism, the coordinator of Redland’s program stated that the joint governing panel would rather recommend termination than allow someone to go through the program twice.

As in the other cities, the vast majority of people indicated that consulting teachers were much more demanding evaluators than building principals. Both union and district officials repeatedly made reference to the poor quality of administrative evaluations, when talking about the strength of their peer-based evaluations. Director of Human Resources, Aurelio Rodriguez, highlights the relative weakness of administrative evaluations, saying

An administrator is required to do a minimum of three observations and a final evaluation on all new teachers. Over the last several years, an analysis from the department of human resources showed that somewhere between 40 and 60%... of new teachers were not getting their full complement of three observations and one evaluation. So they weren't even getting that full contractual observation or evaluation and ... those are the minimum. That's probably the most you're going to get.

The program leaders’ commitment to maintaining the integrity of program through monitoring consulting teachers, having small caseloads per consultant, forbidding recidivism, and releasing consulting teachers for only half of their teaching load has worked to produce an exemplary program which successfully mentors and evaluates teachers.

Professional Legitimacy

Reviewing the programmatic features and quality control indicators in each district, I conclude that all four programs studied are contributing to the betterment of the overall quality of teachers in their respective districts. Although admirable, these contributions are necessary but not sufficient to meet the professional criterion for quality. To do so, the unions, as professional organizations, must take/accept collective responsibility for self-regulated quality control of their members. From the data gathered for this study, it is apparent that the teachers’ unions of Hayesville, Fowlerton, and Redland, accept the necessary responsibility. The Marine City Education Association, however, refuses to accept responsibility for such self-regulation of quality among their members and so does not meet the professional criteria for legitimacy. Thus, the MCEA is professionally illegitimate.

Of the three teachers’ unions accepting the requisite responsibility, as indicated earlier, there are varying levels of effectiveness and programmatic quality. Because of the manner in which consulting teachers are assigned by subject matter specialty and lack of recidivism, the programs in Fowlerton and Redland are superior to Hayesville’s program. The program developed in Hayesville, although reportedly more demanding than principal evaluation, does appear to be fundamentally flawed. The HEA program seems to operate in ignorance of the research supporting the great importance of a deep knowledge of one’s subject matter, and of subject-specific pedagogy. This fact alone does not alter the judgment that HEA accepts responsibility for quality among its members. One can unequivocally determine that the HEA does because their consulting teachers do actively contribute to the dismissal of substandard teachers from their ranks -- an action taboo to traditional labor unions. However, the HEA engages in professional unionism poorly by not making use of readily available pedagogical research or their member’s complaints regarding curricular mismatches between consulting teachers and program participants. When I last spoke with the president of the HEA, he reported that the peer review program’s governing panel would be taking this issue under advisement.

Redland’s unique programmatic structure of releasing consultant teachers for a maximum of half-time, allows a smaller caseload ratio. This facet of their design works to the benefit of program participants by allowing a much closer working arrangement than in any of the other distrits. It also allows more closely matched assignment of consulting teachers according to subject matter to be made. While beneficial for program participants, it may not be most beneficial for elementary students however. Although no data was gathered from students or parents during this study, it seems that splitting an elementary classroom between two consulting teachers, each with a half-time assignment may be problematic for the students. Further study in Redland on the effects of splitting elementary instruction in this way should be conducted.

Union Legitimacy

When answering the question of whether the unions studied uphold the criteria of legitimacy as a union, one must first focus upon the traditional concerns of unions -- wages, working conditions, due process, and job security. In all four districts, the unions were reported to be strong negotiators with district officials. In no district were accusations of "selling out to management" made by even the most critical of informants. In fact, a history of adversarial, sometimes contentious, bargaining was present in each district. Although district-union cooperation through peer review programs did lead to other cooperative ventures occasionally within the districts, as Miller, president of the Fowlerton Federation of Teachers explains,

It (cooperating in the peer review program) does not make the difficult parts of bargaining any easier. It does help with the stuff where there is a mutual determination to resolve problems. But the tough stuff is still tough.

Tough issues in collective bargaining will always arise. The districts and unions studied here are no different. To illustrate, Hayesville, Fowlerton, and Marine City all experienced labor relations strife during the last two years to the point of considering striking against the district. In each instance, however, the peer review program was able to survive the tough times due to a generally accepted utility.

Regarding the issues of job security and due process protections for members, all four districts successfully met these criteria -- but not as traditional industrial unions may meet them. The teachers’ unions examined all continued to support grievances filed by members and closely monitored working conditions for adherence to contract regulations. Teachers’ jobs, however, are not reflexively protected without concern for the quality of the teachers’ job performance. Instead, the peer review programs function as exemplars of due process. For those teachers recommended into intervention, by definition, they have been identified as substantially substandard teachers who, without peer review programs, would be recommended for termination by their building administrator. Instead, they enter an intensive program designed to provide the assistance necessary to improve their job performance to an acceptable level. Only if they fail to do so, then dismissal proceedings may proceed on the basis of incompetence.

Reconciling the Competing Criteria of Legitimacy

Generally speaking, teacher peer review programs do hold promise for successfully reconciling the competing criteria of legitimacy. In Fowlerton, Redland, and to a lesser extent, Hayesville, the competing criteria of professionalism and unionism were successfully reconciled. The unions in each of these three cities were able to take responsibility for the quality of their members, while at the same time remaining tough negotiators over the traditional "bread and butter" concerns of more conservative unionists. The teachers’ union of Marine City, because it could not satisfy the professional criterion for legitimacy, failed to achieve the synthesis observed in the other districts.

In the successful districts, the teachers’ unions have undergone an institutional and organizational metamorphosis, without a great deal of internal difficulty or dissension. The cognitive and normative constraints which institutionalism predicts for organizations attempting fundamental change were not insuperable. Actually, they were far weaker than would be stereotypically predicted for organizations as historically and institutionally bound as teachers’ unions, thereby lending credence to the importance of organizational delegitimation as a catalyst for significant change. This is not to say that no internal opposition arose in these districts, or will develop as the National Education Association makes embracing "new unionism" and collective responsibility for the quality of teachers primary issues.

Indeed, dissent was present in each district studied when the concept of teacher peer review was considered, most prominently in Marine City. Recently, very strong opposition among a minority of NEA state and local affiliates quickly developed as the national union charts a new course for teacher unionism. NEA president Bob Chase has been accused by critics of being a "heretic" regarding the institution of unionism (Chase 1997c). State-level affiliates from California, New Jersey and Wisconsin have generated particularly vitriolic opposition. Dennis Testa, president of the New Jersey Education Association, when speaking in opposition to the NEA’s acceptance of peer review claimed that he "wanted to continue to be teachers’ protector" (quoted in Bradley, 1997, p. 14). Testa’s position is indicative of traditional unionist’s who view "the union in the role of defender interposed between teachers (the potential victims) and administrators (the evaluators)" (Chase, 1997c, p. 28). Within this conception of teachers and unionism, "teachers remain largely passive -- pawns whose fate is determined by others" (Chase, 1997c, p. 28).

It is against this conception of teachers and their unions that the implementation of peer review specifically, and professional unionism more generally, must compete at various organizational levels of teacher unionism -- local, state and national. It is interesting to note that the strongest opposition to the concept of peer review within teachers’ unions does not take place in the local districts which attempt it, but at the state and national level. This may be due to the rather heterogeneous nature of teachers which constitute the collective bargaining units around which local unions form. As the union organization narrows as one moves vertically through the union bureaucratic structure, it may be that a homogenization process occurs (Berube, 1988; Lieberman, 1997). The result of this process may be that union leaders, those leading state level organizations and those working at the national level, may be more homogenous and more strongly committed to unionism norms and values than the union members who are actively teaching in classrooms.

Policy Recommendations

Although the preceding analysis may be interesting to educational reformers and union leaders, for those considering implementation of teacher peer review a more practical question is of more pressing interest; How can further efforts at teacher professionalization through peer review be best facilitated? For these readers, this final section offers a series of practical considerations and policy recommendations to better inform their efforts. In this concluding section, a series of concrete programmatic and policy recommendations are offered to local teachers’ unions and school districts considering changing their teacher evaluation practices to a peer review-based approach.

For local school districts and teachers’ unions, I offer the following ten recommendations for programmatic design and implementation. Each will be explained briefly.

1. Go Slowly

1. Keep open lines of communication between teachers, principals, union and district officials.

1. Establish clear criteria for selection of consulting teachers.

1. Provide professional development/training for consulting teachers to establish a common basis for operations.

1. Periodically review consulting teachers’ work to ensure maintenance of uniform enforcement of performance standards.

1. Match consulting teachers and participants by grade level or subject matter

1. Establish clear standards as quality performance indicators.

1. Directly connect peer review program with dismissal proceedings.

1. Establish a three semester limit for placement in intervention.

1. Avoid recidivism.

Go Slowly. Because of the cognitive and normative constraints within which school personnel currently operate, it is imperative that districts and unions take the time to educate members of their organizations about the concepts and purposes underlying peer review programs. Rushing through the design and implementation process will only result in generating strong opposition both from traditional unionists who view peer review as a threat to solidarity and administrators who may view it as a loss of authority or power.

Keep open lines of communication between teachers, principals, union and district officials. It is important that open communication exist during the processes of program design and implementation. The districts included in this study used a variety of methods to communicate among the various parties, including weekly union newsletters, presentations at each school within the district, and large district wide meetings of teachers and/or administrators. During interviews, district and union representatives uniformly stressed the importance of good communication and the desire that their district had given the process more thought. It was not uncommon to hear interviewees, such as Tuckey Pattra, president of the Marine City Education Association to make comments regarding rumors during the implementation process such as,

The first year or so, the kinds of rumors we got, they were funny they were so ridiculous. We started out with "All of the consulting teachers have district cars and cell phones." and "They all have brand-new computers." We all looked around and said "WHERE?" Two of our consulting teachers did have cell phones, but they bought them with their own money. They did not have district cars or any of those luxurious things.

To avoid such rumors, it is imperative that all parties understand the process and the programmatic features being discussed.

Establish clear criteria for selection of consulting teachers. To avoid any misunderstanding among teachers, it is imperative to have clearly defined criteria for the selection of consulting teachers. An appearance of impropriety during the selection process will negatively affect the face validity of the entire program.

Provide professional development/training for consulting teachers to establish a common basis for operations. To avoid the problems of inconsistent applications of performance standards among consultant teachers, it is important that they receive some common form of training from program leaders and/or outside consultants in either evaluation or adult learning. Furthermore, it may of use to the district and program for consultant teachers to engage in further professional development around issues pertinent to the local district to broaden the scope of expertise among their consultant teachers.

Periodically review consulting teachers’ work to ensure maintenance of uniform enforcement of performance standards. Professional development and common training is not always enough to ensure consistency in consulting teacher performance. Some individuals, while excellent classroom teachers, may fail to be adequate mentors or evaluators. Furthermore, as close working relationships between consulting teachers and program participants develop, some consultants may be unable to make the hard decision to make a negative evaluation.

Match consulting teachers and participants by grade level or subject matter. It is important for consulting teachers and participants to have a common professional frame of reference. It is unfair, and professionally indefensible in light of pedagogical research, to ask both a consulting teacher to evaluate/mentor a teacher teaching outside of the consultant’s range of expertise, as well as to ask a teacher to submit to evaluation by such an evaluator.

Establish clear standards as quality performance indicators. To avoid any ambiguity during the evaluation process, it is important to establish clear indicators of quality performance. By doing so, it is clear to both the consultant teacher and the program participant the criteria by which the evaluation and mentoring processes will be guided. Furthermore, clear standards will articulate for all teachers within a district, whether involved in the peer review process or not, what professional expectations the district holds for them.

Directly connect peer review program with dismissal proceedings. In order for teachers’ unions to make the claim that they are professional organizations, they must be willing to accept responsibility for maintaining an acceptable level of quality control among practitioners. Failure to do so will result in criticism of the union’s embrace of "peer review" as only more empty union rhetoric, designed to mollify the public into thinking that accountability is being addressed. This most likely will result in further delegitimation of the union. Furthermore, failure to connect peer review programs with dismissal proceedings results in no clear benefit to district administrators who must document and often duplicate efforts of the consulting teachers. The end result being that substandard teachers remain in the classroom with children much longer and the cost of dismissing these teachers increases.

Establish a three semester limit for placement in intervention. Although Fowlerton, Hayesville, and Marine City do not place time limits upon intervention, claiming that it is unfair to place artificially imposed time limits upon processes of remediation with goals as various as intervention participants, I think they are in error. By definition, while a teacher is in the intervention process, they are substandard. As such they are not offering to children appropriate educational experiences. Therefore, it is in the best interest of the children to establish some terminal point at which a decision must be made. By establishing a three semester limit, intervention participants are allowed at least a full school year to improve their performance. The additional semester allows for both placements made during semesters, and for decisions to be made at semester breaks to reduce the upheaval caused by the dismissal of a teacher.

Avoid recidivism. Nothing will damn a peer review program faster than recidivism. If a former program participant is (re)recommended for intervention, program leaders should think very carefully about accepting the teacher back into the program. Under no circumstances should a teacher be re-accepted shortly after being successfully released from a program. However, in the interests of fairness, both to the program and the individual teacher, it is reasonable to allow some teachers who successfully completed their intern experience at the beginning of their career to be admitted into intervention at some point several years later. What this time limit should be, or under what conditions intervention recommendations should be accepted, must be decided locally through joint discussions with district administrators and union officials.

Summary

Teacher peer review programs do offer local unions an avenue through which the competing criteria for legitimacy may be reconciled successfully. Implementation of peer review programs in and of itself does not guarantee successful reconciliation, as is so clearly observed in Marine City. When considering design and implementation of such programs it is imperative that efforts are informed by a thorough knowledge of the institutional context in which the various actors involved work. Furthermore, it is important that sufficient attention be paid to the clarity of performance standards and the consistency with which they are applied. Without doing so, teacher peer review programs will fail to reconcile the competing criteria for legitimacy well. Hayesville, provides ample evidence of a local union with good intentions at reconciliation, but does so in a manner which is substantially less than optimal. Therefore, while peer review programs may hold much promise for teacher professionalization and professional unionism, they are not panaceas. They must be designed, implemented and operated with great care and in full knowledge that institutional constraints are inherent in major organizational reforms. The following chapter offers for potential reformers a series of policy recommendations and programmatic design concerns in an effort to better inform future efforts.

The process of engaging in organizational and institutional change is very complex. The interconnections between the multiple goals pursued by the various participants in a school district quickly become labyrinthine. The end result, however, is a web of support for a process through which some school districts are attempting to improve educational experience of children -- teacher peer review. Whether the actors’ goals are accountability to the public, or increased professionalism, they both unite in seeking increased legitimacy for their respective organizations by focusing on improved teaching. It is important for reformers at the local level to have a unifying goal to which potential adversaries may justifiably support in order to maintain organizational legitimacy.

From the data presented, it appears that the three factors contributing to the retention of poorly performing teachers (i.e. poor quality of principal evaluation of teacher, union protection of incompetent teachers, and a high attrition rate among novices) are addressed by through the process of peer review peer review as it was implemented in the focal cities. In each of the cities, the numbers of substandard teachers leaving the district, either through retirement, dismissal, or resignation, increased under their respective peer review systems. At the same time, districts reported lower rates of attrition among novice teachers. Furthermore, from reports in local newspapers and heightened prominence at the national level, it appears that engagement in peer review may have beneficial effects on the legitimacy of local teachers’ unions.

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