SACRAMENTO, CA. -- When Governor Gray Davis rolled out his education reform proposals a couple of weeks ago, he claimed the bills he was sponsoring would "substantially improve education" in California. Is
there any real evidence, however, to support the governor’s optimism.

Take, for example, teacher peer review, a key component of the governor’s education package. Under Davis’
proposal, state funding increases would be used to encourage school districts to use specially chosen
mentor teachers to evaluate the competence of their colleagues. The actual particulars of the peer review
system would be worked out through local collective bargaining between school districts and teachers’
unions.

The Davis proposal, unfortunately, will almost certainly fail to improve either teacher performance or
student achievement. Why? In a highly informative recent book entitled Teachers Evaluating Teachers,
education reform expert Dr. Myron Lieberman points out that virtually all teacher peer review systems fail to
hold incompetent teachers truly accountable. Dr. Lieberman defines accountability as the imposition of
negative consequences (e.g., firing, pay cut, etc.) on an individual who fails to act competently. Dr.
Lieberman stresses that where an individual employee, such as a teacher, performs incompetently,
accountability doesn’t mean negative consequences to society or to a group. "There is accountability," says
Dr. Lieberman, "only if the teachers who perform poorly suffer adverse consequences personally as a result of
their actions."

The problem with all teacher peer review systems tried so far in the United States is that they fail to impose
negative consequences on individual incompetent teachers. Take, for instance, Toledo, Ohio’s nationally
acclaimed teacher peer review program. In a twelve-year period, only 32 tenured Toledo teachers retired,
resigned, or were fired through the peer review process. This number represents less than one percent
of the approximately 4,000 tenured teachers that were employed in Toledo during this time period. It is
unsurprising, then, that Toledo’s teacher peer review program has had little effect on student performance.
Indeed, Dr. Lieberman notes that, "At no time, however, has anyone, including peer review’s strongest
supporters, demonstrated that pupil achievement has gone up as a result of peer review."

Instead of firing incompetent teachers, most peer review programs merely require that incompetent
teachers be provided with assistance such as more professional development classes. Governor Davis’
proposal leaves the details about whether to fire incompetent teachers or simply to assist them to local
collective bargaining. One can bet one’s bottom dollar that the peer review programs that come out of this
bargaining will stress assistance over termination since the teachers union will never stand for making it
easier to fire tenured teachers. Davis’ proposal, therefore, ultimately fails to impose any true
accountability on teachers.

In most public schools today, principals are responsible for evaluating teachers. Their efforts to fire incompetent teachers are typically frustrated by restrictive teacher union contracts. Instead of involving the teachers’ unions even more in personnel management through teacher peer review, Dr. Lieberman recommends the elimination of contractual provisions that cripple school officials’ ability to terminate incompetent teachers. "That," says Dr. Lieberman, "would be reform with a chance for the kind of accountability Governor Davis says he wants."

-- Lance T. Izumi