Toledo Mentors California in Peer Review of Teachers

With dual doctorates in chemistry and materials science and 23 years as a college instructor, Abdul Ismail looked like a dream candidate for a job teaching high school science.

But despite his glowing resume, Ismail quickly ran into trouble. He had difficulty relating to 14-year-olds. His lectures were dry recitations delivered facing the chalkboard. When the students acted up, he kicked them out.

In most schools, such a teacher would give up or muddle along in isolation. But not in Toledo, which pioneered a process that assigns senior teachers to closely monitor the work of first-year instructors--as well some struggling veterans--and coach them on how to improve.

And if they don’t improve? Those same dues-paying union members will recommend their dismissal.

Toledo’s peer review program, established in 1981, is the model for similar efforts in Rochester, Columbus, the San Diego suburb of Poway and about a dozen other districts nationwide.

Now, amid a growing national consensus that the key to improved student achievement is improved teaching, Gov. Gray Davis wants to spend $100 million to launch the nation’s first statewide peer review effort in California.

“The best person to improve a teacher’s performance is another teacher,” Davis said. “I believe teachers will be pretty tough on one another. Most teachers want to feel they are part of something important and they want to weed out people who aren’t doing a good job.”

In touting his proposal, Davis has cited the example of Toledo. But his proposal differs in major ways from the “Toledo Plan.” And those differences have rankled some union leaders.

First, it would involve only permanent teachers, not those just starting out and on probation. Second, principals would retain significant powers of evaluation and be able to decide which teachers need help. And third, teachers in the peer review program would be judged in part on their students’ test scores.

“We’re not going to go along with it,” said Day Higuchi, president of United Teachers-Los Angeles. “It’s not well-crafted. It’s just something somebody threw together.”

Last weekend, the statewide California Teachers Assn. voted to “watch” the legislation and seek to change it rather than try to block it outright.

Higuchi said he will press Davis and the bill’s author, Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa (D-Los Angeles), to let unions and school districts create programs similar to the one in Toledo.

For starters, he said, he wants the peer review program to focus on the needs of beginners. That is especially important in Los Angeles, which hires more than 4,000 new teachers annually. Under Davis’ plan, money now used to pay teachers to assist, but not evaluate, neophytes would be diverted to helping veterans.

New Teachers Are Affected Most

In Toledo, as elsewhere, having peers evaluate the work of veterans is controversial. In the past 17 years, about 54 senior teachers have left or been fired as a result of the peer review process, which strikes some as too few.

“There have been cases where there were serious complaints about teachers and nothing happened,” said Terry Glazer, president of the Toledo Board of Education.

But even Glazer praised the assistance the program gives to beginners. Julia Koppich, a San Francisco Bay Area consultant who has studied peer review nationally, summed it up this way: “People who would have left in the first year stayed and became better and people who shouldn’t have been in teaching are out the first year.”

Ismail, the Toledo teacher who struggled when he began teaching last fall, was assisted by Iris Szelagowski, one of Ohio’s top science teachers. She spent hours in the back of his room, typing notes into her laptop computer. Afterward, she discussed her observations and made suggestions for improvement.

“There was fraternity and respect,” Ismail said.

But Szelagowski also was blunt. “He was very dry, like he was teaching college classes,” she said.

Szelagowski urged Ismail to turn around and face the class, use an overhead projector and develop real-world examples. So, on a recent day, he sprinted across the classroom to demonstrate acceleration and explained velocity by using the example of a trip to a nearby city.

To improve discipline, Szelagowski directed him to write class rules and stick by them and also to “lighten up a bit,” Ismail, a native of Somalia, recalled. Now, he said, “I’m moving forward.”

The process weeds out about 8% of Toledo’s newcomers annually--either directly or indirectly.

Dismissals result from reports that consulting teachers present on each rookie to the Board of Review in a room at the central office known ominously as the “Decision Room.”

As part of the union’s commitment to the program, it will not defend its members against negative decisions by the board, which is made up of five members appointed by the union and four by the district.

In California, beginning teachers may be dismissed during their first year on the job without cause. But few are because most principals do not have time to observe their work. Veteran teachers almost never lose their jobs because the union almost always defends fired teachers in lawsuits that are time-consuming and expensive.

In a peer review system, however, the union and the school district have a common interest, said Donald Raczka, president of the Poway Federation of Teachers, which went to peer review in 1987.

“The teacher advocacy role drops off and we are really concerned about the quality of what’s going on,” he said. “How’s the teacher doing? What are they doing to measure up to the standards? What is the consultant doing to help them?”

Barbara Patroulis, a consulting teacher in Toledo, came before the review board recently and had mostly good news to report. She praised a second-grade teacher for her “wonderful patience.” Another kept her bulletin boards “current and attractive.” And a third “truly treats her students with dignity”

But another consulting teacher, Karen Bade, described a meltdown in a class serving students with severe behavior problems. Bade had visited this particular teacher, who had taught in other districts, eight times for at least 90 minutes. During six of those visits, students ran out of the room or the teacher had to call for help to control a violent student. Bade saw computers knocked off desks and chairs thrown.

The board voted to give that teacher another semester to work things out, in part because she hadn’t been trained to deal with such difficult students. “We can’t keep going on forever with her,” said Francine Lawrence, president of the Toledo Federation of Teachers.

In Toledo, a struggling blue-collar town that once produced windshields for virtually all American-built automobiles, unions wield considerable power. So it is fitting that it was the Toledo Federation of Teachers that initiated peer review.

Dal Lawrence, president of the local from 1966-1996, came up with the idea of having senior teachers work with rookies in 1971. It wasn’t until 1981 that the district agreed, with the provision that the system also apply to veteran teachers.

The union went along and then set the terms for the process: If a principal wanted a veteran teacher to be reviewed, a teacher committee at the school had to concur that an evaluation was warranted. The union controlled the selection of the consulting teachers and dominated the Board of Review.

It was only last year, during bitter labor negotiations, that principals won the power to initiate a review of a veteran teacher’s performance. That has led to peers being assigned to assist seven senior teachers this school year.

That’s the process followed in most peer review programs, and experts who favor peer review say it results in far more veteran teachers being dismissed or resigning than in places that do not have such programs.

But Gary Hart, Davis’ secretary of education, said the goal of the governor’s proposal is not to get more teachers fired. Rather, he said, Davis’ proposal “is meant to be a program to help people . . . to try to turn it around.”

Toledo’s program has been cited in influential reports on ways to improve the quality of teaching. And the practice of having highly regarded experienced teachers mentor novices has spread widely.

Cost and Politics Are Obstacles

But it’s still rare for teachers to judge the work of other teachers.

One reason is that such programs are costly, requiring one full-time consultant for every 12 to 15 teachers to be evaluated. In Toledo, a 40,000-student district, the program costs more than $1 million.

Also, until 1997, the National Education Assn., the nation’s largest teachers organization, opposed peer review. The Toledo union is affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers, which has long supported such programs.

In addition, despite the example of Toledo and other districts, teachers, like union members in general, are loath to risk job security by giving someone the power to evaluate their work.

Principals remain wary as well, reluctant to give up their authority over hiring and firing.

In California, teachers are evaluated regularly by principals throughout their careers, a process that the Davis proposal would preserve. But in Toledo, veteran teachers are evaluated only if they seem to be having trouble. And even then, only by their peers, never by the principal.

Merrill Grant, hired as Toledo’s superintendent in 1996, wanted all teachers to be evaluated by principals annually. But he had to give up on that demand after the union argued that principals were ill-equipped to judge teacher performance and accused him of trying to destroy the union.

Another hurdle for peer review advocates is that they have not been able to demonstrate that it has raised the level of academic achievement anywhere that it’s been tried.

Toledo’s test scores on the state’s proficiency exams have been improving and rate near the top among the state’s other large cities. But only about a third of the district’s fourth-graders pass the state’s proficiency test in reading and 20% pass in math.

But Lawrence, the father of peer review, looks at it differently.

As a result of peer review, he said, “there are over 300 teachers who are not teaching now in Toledo. How do you measure the impact of that on students? You can’t, except to say that at least that malpractice is not going on.”