The recent love fest by reporter Claudio Sanchez on NPR's All Things Considered showcasing Toledo?s peer review program prompted us to revisit this program. It's not just Sanchez who touts Toledo as a model for offering more effective teacher evaluations and a more collaborative labor-management environment: the program is a big fave with the AFT. While we won't attempt to understand a district's complex labor climate from inside the Beltway, we will postulate as to whether the Toledo Peer Review is really as effective at doing what it says it does, which is weeding out poorly performing teachers. We struggled to find an independent study of the program--oddly enough, there just doesn't seem to be one--so we called the Toledo Federation of Teachers to get their take.

What's little known is that the Toledo program, with only a few exceptions, is targeted at first year teachers. In almost every respect, it serves as a mentorship program, except that the mentors also formally evaluate a teacher?s performance and the school principal does not. There's little evidence that this unique brand of mentoring is more effective at identifying new teachers who shouldn't earn tenure. On average about eight percent of teachers don't return for a second year. According to Toledo's peer review guru, Dal Lawrence, virtually no teacher in the district fails to earn tenure after his or her second year in the classroom. All but a few of Toledo's teachers pass go and collect $200.

Once a teacher has tenure, the Toledo teacher contract ensures that s/he will never be evaluated again, unless the teacher is deemed to have some egregious instructional deficiency--a deficiency identified in only 125 teachers over 27 years, out of a current teaching force of 2,350. These teachers are then assigned to the "Peer Assistance and Review Program", a tailor made intervention that generally lasts between one and a half to two and a half years and which can in fact lead to a peer review panel deciding that a teacher just needs to go.

Out of the 125 teachers identified for this intervention, 87 have been fired by the district in 27 years--an average of 3 teachers a year. That's a rate of .01 percent per year (assuming the size of the teacher force has remained relatively constant). It's a rate that would be deemed laughable in almost any other context. But because this is teaching, Toledo's rate may actually be a bit above the norm of those districts where principals drive the evaluation and dismissal process. See here and here for example.

While we would have loved to reach the same happy conclusion about Toledo's model as Sanchez, these numbers, however incrementally better, just don?t bowl us over. (Certainly it doesn't seem to be the case that Toledo just does a better job in hiring than other districts. Its student performance ratings lie at the bottom of the state's rankings.) While some presidential candidates are proposing $300 million prizes for car batteries, we think a similar level of prize should go to the first school district that gets evaluation and tenure right.