Administrators gave 98 percent of the teachers they evaluated a perfect score.
Many people believe that getting tenure guarantees a teacher a lifetime job, even if the teacher's subsequent performance is lousy. So they listen sympathetically to calls for abolishing tenure. But tenure does nothing of the sort. It simply guarantees that there will be some form of due process before a teacher can be dismissed. The real problem lies in the evaluation process that leads to tenure and monitors the performance of tenured teachers.
Tenure decisions are typically based on evaluations made by an administrator. He probably pays a flying visit to a new teacher's classroom a couple of times a year, which gives him very little basis for deciding whether or not a teacher is doing a good job. As a result, novice teachers who need help don't get if; instead, they are likely to receive a satisfactory or even an excellent on their evaluations. After three or four years, when the probationary period is over, they probably get tenure.
Because evaluations of tenured teachers are even skimpier, administrators are also unlikely to notice that someone's teaching is not up to par. So they often don't have any firm basis for recommending that a tenured teacher be let go.
"Don't Let Teacher Evaluation Become a Ritual," an article directed to school administrators (Executive Educator, May 1988), minces no words in describing how worthless evaluations often are. The authors cite their survey of 3 5 school districts in eastern Pennsylvania, which showed that 98 percent of the teachers were given a perfect score of 80 by the administrators who evaluated them; 1.1 percent got scores between 75 and 79; and fewer than I percent scored below 74. Was there something in the Pennsylvania water that made for perfect teaching? The authors thought it more likely that the evaluations were sloppy -- and they didn't think this was a local problem: "We suspect that inflated scores on teacher evaluations are common. And these scores are a sign that teacher supervision and evaluation are in trouble in many school systems."
Everybody loses with a system like this -- other teachers, who have to live with the results of bad teaching by a colleague, as well as students. But there is an alternative that works. Peer review or peer intervention - it goes by various names - is a system developed by teacher unions, in collaboration with their school districts, in which experienced and excellent teachers observe probationary teachers and offer them help when they need it. At the conclusion of the probationary period, these master teachers make recommendations about who should be offered tenure and who let go. Peer review also includes assistance to tenured teachers who need help with their teaching and, in some cases, advice to quit the profession.
Toledo Federation of Teachers' peer review program, perhaps the first in the country, has been in operation since 1981. In Toledo, consulting teachers spend up to three years helping to train and evaluate new teachers, and they play a major role in deciding which new teachers will get tenure. Tenured teachers who are in trouble get the same kind of one-on-one help from colleagues, and it continues until the troubled teacher has either improved to the point of being successful or a termination is recommended. But aren't teachers likely to be even easier on their colleagues than administrators? Both the Toledo Federation of Teachers and the Cincinnati Federation of Teachers, which has had a peer assistance and evaluation program since 1985, have found the opposite to be true. In the Cincinnati program's first year, consulting teachers rated 10.5 percent of their new teachers less than satisfactory, compared to 4 percent by administrators. And 5 percent of beginning teachers under peer review were recommended for dismissal as compared to 1. 6 percent of those evaluated by principals. Results for subsequent years have been similar.
Cincinnati has an arrangement similar to Toledo's for veteran teachers whose teaching is not up to par. After two years of support and assistance, the consulting teacher makes a final report, recommending dismissal if necessary. This system salvages teachers who can be helped, but there is another important plus. It greatly reduces the number of dismissals that lead to lengthy and expensive disputes. According to Tom Mooney, president of the Cincinnati Federation of Teachers, this is because the teachers who are advised to leave can't blame their termination on sloppy or unfair procedures by management. They have been offered help by their colleagues and given a chance to improve. At best, the decision to terminate represents a consensus among the various parties. At the very least, the teacher sees that he won't have much of a court case.
Teachers (and teacher unions) don't hire, evaluate or tenure teachers: administrators do. But the whole process would be a lot better if teachers were able, as a profession, to take responsibility for themselves. The programs in Toledo and Cincinnati, and similar ones sponsored by the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers and the Rochester Teachers Association, show that this idea can work. Instead of getting rid of tenure, we should be moving to give teachers more say about who becomes - and remains - a tenured colleague.