Teachers Evaluating Teachers: Peers Review and the New Unionism (Studies in Social Philosophy and Policy)

As a writer on education reform, Myron Lieberman has criticized the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) for standing in the way of needed improvement in our schools. One of the most telling criticisms of these organizations is that they have been too quick to defend teachers charged with incompetence. In response to this charge from Lieberman and others, the NEA and the AFT have championed a “new unionism,” under which teacher unions would assume responsibility for ensuring teacher competence by instituting peer review systems.

Teachers Evaluating Teachers explores the peer review phenomenon and the teacher unions’ stake in perpetuating it. Lieberman examines the costs of peer review programs and seeks to determine whether their promised benefits have been realized. The true test of a program’s success should be improvement in teacher competence, which would lead to gains in student achievement, but Lieberman argues that there is no evidence that student scores on standardized test have improved in districts with peer review. Indeed, he shows that peer review has had little or no impact on the number dismissed on grounds of poor performance.