THEY CALL IT "THE DANCE OF THE LEMONS," the ritual by which ineffective teachers manage to retain teaching jobs despite their incompetence. Principals, wary of union hurdles, legal costs, and the emotional scorched-earth politics that accompany teacher dismissals, simply pass their "lemons" on to the next unlucky school.
Eventually, however, the lemons settle down, usually in the schools with the least-able principals, in the worst neighborhoods. Such institutions tend to enroll the low-income children most in need of capable instructors and a challenging curriculum.
The pattern often goes unnoticed within the larger mosaic of urban ills -- so much so that only recently have policy reformers concentrated their attention on the need to remove incompetent teachers. Happily, some recent developments -- especially the invention of a new tool for measuring student gains -- could make it easier to identify effective teachers. Yet for the time being, teacher competence remains a red-hot issue, on which teachers' unions and their critics sharply diverge.
Stung by the charge that they routinely defend bad teachers, the unions have championed plans to police their profession through "peer review." Only a handful of peer review programs are in existence, but the idea is that experienced teachers would counsel new teachers, help determine which new recruits are retained, advise struggling teachers, and identify bad teachers to be weeded out. Theoretically, this would keep bad teachers out of the system and so spare unions from having to defend them.
Under the prevailing system, principals evaluate rank-and-file teachers, who tend to see peer review as a heresy pitting teacher against teacher. But the clamor to improve public education has gotten louder, and unions are feeling the heat. Bob Chase, president of the 2.4-million-member National Education Association, in 1997 made peer review the centerpiece of his "new unionism." With his support, the 1997 NEA convention gave the idea a limited endorsement. "Other unions have been unwilling to address the quality of their product -- and look what happened to their industries and their unions," Chase reasoned in a National Press Club address last year.
The idea continues to resonate. By the NEA's count, peer review plans have been authorized or adopted by locals in nine states. In addition, California recently enacted incentives for schools to adopt peer review. The NEA affiliate bitterly fought the plan, backed by Gov. Gray Davis, because it targets veteran teachers, not just new ones; and the union succeeded in watering down the penalties for schools that decline to participate. Undoubtedly, the proliferation of peer review initiatives presents the appearance of bold action, helping labor bosses stave off the threat of vouchers and privatization.
But skeptics counter that peer review is a hollow reform, which fails to connect teachers' employment to proof that kids are learning. Myron Lieberman, an American Federation of Teachers official-turned-critic and chairman of the Education Policy Institute, studied long-running peer review plans in Toledo and Columbus, Ohio, and Rochester, New York, in researching his new book Teachers Evaluating Teachers: Peer Review and the New Unionism. His conclusion: Peer review is a "huge patronage windfall" for teachers' unions eager to boost their standing with the public. It is an unjustified transfer of power, he says, as long as there is little evidence that any peer review program has caused student test scores to improve. Moreover, he argues, peer review may actually make it more difficult to fire bad teachers, since union contracts often bar principals from observing teachers who participate in peer review programs. Indeed, Lieberman finds no evidence that peer review promotes the removal of poor teachers.
In Columbus, Ohio, for example, where peer review has been used for 11 years, only about 5 percent of new recruits either were not renewed by peer evaluators or resigned before the end of the program. Lieberman, who negotiated hundreds of union contracts in the 1970s, considers that number unimpressive. "It is highly unlikely that peer review was more effective than conventional procedures in weeding out bad teachers," he writes (though he notes that no records from before peer review exist to permit a true comparison in Columbus). In light of the expense of paying teacher evaluators, Lieberman holds that peer review would have to prove better than the existing process at removing bad teachers, a burden he says current programs have not met.
If not peer review, then, what system will keep talented instructors in the public schools? For years, school boards and superintendents have tried to install merit pay as an incentive for good teaching. But teachers' unions, fearing that merit pay will undermine collegiality and devolve into popularity contests or political setups, have beaten back or neutered most proposals, along with "differential pay" plans to attract scarce math and science teachers. No teacher wants to earn less than the teacher in the next classroom, even if the latter's skills are more in demand.
Reformers have tried to enshrine the broad principle that teachers' tenure should be linked to student achievement, and in some places, principals and superintendents are being held accountable, even fired, for student test scores. But principals see this as a cruel joke, since the teachers ostensibly subordinate to them are largely immune. It's even more of a farce in districts where principals lack dismissal power and must go to higher-ups to start proceedings against a bad teacher. "In many states, you have the responsibility without the authority," says Samuel Sava, executive director of the 27,000-member National Association of Elementary School Principals.
Most performance-based accountability schemes run aground on the controversy over standardized tests. Critics say using test scores as part of teacher evaluation is unfair because test results are influenced by factors beyond the reach of teachers, such as poverty, family conditions, and shoddy textbooks. Others argue that "teaching to the test" -- which they claim will result if teachers' jobs are tied to test scores -- reduces learning to memorization of multiple-choice factoids.
But a relatively new and sophisticated testing system may answer many of these concerns -- perhaps making possible a new generation of merit-pay plans. This break-through was the work of statistician William Sanders of the University of Tennessee, an agriculture specialist who turned to the study of education in the early 1980s. His Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System (TVAAS) is a tool for analyzing gains made by groups of students. Because it filters out the effects of socioeconomic factors such as family background, the method makes it possible to measure the value teachers, schools, and districts have added to a child's education.
The concept is straightforward: Students take an approved standardized test at the beginning and end of the year. Thus, students are measured against themselves, and the results over at least three years reveal the learning rate of the group. A dip in the curve for the entire group of students, not just one, likely reflects faulty teaching or curriculum. "The relatively ineffective teachers are not getting appropriate academic growth," Sanders told state lawmakers gathered in Portland, Oregon, last July. "Superior teachers get substantial growth."
In Tennessee, school officials have used TVAAS data since 1991, to identify shortcomings in instruction and curriculum, and as part of confidential teacher evaluations. Sanders wants it to remain a mere diagnostic tool not linked to merit pay, and state officials say they know of no teacher discharged because of inadequate student gains. But some proponents believe that TVAAS could outgrow its inventor and become a much more powerful tool. "I can't figure out how you would do merit pay without the Sanders system," says Amy Wilkins, an analyst with the Education Trust, a Washington group fighting for higher teaching standards.
Tennessee officials, who so far have collected 6 million TVAAS student records, give the program rave reviews. "It's the only socially, morally, and politically appropriate way to evaluate what's going on in education," says Ben Brown, state director of student evaluation and assessment. "People are now focused on improvement." Al Mance, an official with the state NEA affiliate, cautiously agrees, though he deems a link between TVAAS scores and merit raises inappropriate. TVAAS, he says, "gives educators a fairer idea of where students are gaining and where they are not."
A few hundred miles away in Dallas, research conducted by public school officials using TVAAS methods recently underscored the importance of recruiting and retaining good teachers They found that bad teaching continues to depress students' performance even after they get better teachers, a discovery that has convinced many that student test scores should play a larger role in teacher evaluations. "We want to see what happens when you really do link student performance with teacher evaluations and with accountability," Dallas school board member Kathleen Leos told Education Week.
While TVAAS is still relatively obscure in policy circles, some national reformers tout the program's measurable results over the fuzzier outcomes of peer review. "If you're going to have an accountability system, it makes sense to have this as at least one part," says Mike Petrilli, program director for the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a Washington philanthropy that funds education reform from a conservative perspective. "A quality teacher is one who adds value to a child's education."
Leaders of teachers' unions, meanwhile, have neither endorsed nor condemned the innovation. But an unguarded remark by a prominent professor shows the chilly reception that outsiders like Sanders often receive from education professionals. Scoffed Charles Achilles, an Eastern Michigan University education professor and class-size researcher, "I'm always nervous when an agricultural statistician works in education."
Jonathan Fox is an education writer in Washington, D.C.