Peer Review in High Schools?

Bill Bennett has suggested that because teachers know who the other good teachers are, they are positioned to determine who deserves merit pay. Its true they are positioned to do so, but would they judge their peers on the quality of their teaching, or would other considerations dominate the process?

There are reasons to suppose that they would not. First among the evidence is the report of teachers themselves. I called Morning in America and related my experience discussing this issue in a room full of teachers in a graduate philosophy of education class. Working teachers were unanimously opposed, fearing abuse, favoritism, and payback. Callers to Bennett's show were in the same vein. One caller, perhaps half jokingly, predicted fighting in the parking lot.

As someone with a Lockean turn of mind, I am disturbed by the consensus that teachers cannot be self-governing. Yet there is evidence that this would be so. Self-governance or self-regulation, either as a polity or as a profession, such as doctors and lawyers, requires an established professional ethos. In education, there is nothing but philosophical chaos. The teacher's colleges and the NEA promote a progressive (positivist) philosophy. The state departments of education have a strong component of essentialism (back-to-basics plus testing). Teachers themselves run the gamut, including behaviorists (education by conditioning), existentialists (students create their own reality, or at least meaning), and social reconstructionists (the mission of the school is reform society), as well as the progressives and essentialists. There may even be a classicist or two running around. With such different views on the nature of the student, the role of the teacher, and the mission of the school in each philosophy, and the complicating factor that most teachers don't have a well developed philosophy (indeed in my experience they can't tell one from the other even after you explain it to them) and to tend to be an eclectic mix of habit, learning, and experience, establishing a professional ethos would have to come from outside the profession. Indeed, this is basically the current state of affairs, with progressives pushing their agenda from professional organizations and the teacher's colleges, and the state boards of ed responding to the parents, voters, and taxpayers demanding the back-to-basics curriculum and accountability. However, both forces are mostly stalemated as far as controlling the philosophical agenda. Ultimately, the parents, voters, and taxpayers have the greater power, but its a mostly unmotivated power, roused temporarily by bad news or obvious failure.

Even if the political system were to impose a single hybrid ideology (one must suppose it would look like the mission statements of the better suburban schools: mostly essentialist with some elements of the others) such an act would be outdated even before it was done. In the current era, it seems much more sensible to create a marketplace of competing ideologies rather than impose a uniform ideology by state action. In effect, each school would be formed around its guiding philosophy, which it would market to parents, and govern itself accordingly. Even still, decisions about hiring, merit rewards, and firing would probably reside in with the head of the school, whether the principal or some similar executive position.

Consider similar problems teachers have. Grade inflation, school politics, and the popularity contest phenomenon all undermine confidence that teachers would judge their peers by merit and would avoid an assessment proceedure to reward their friends, help out the sympathetic, punish their rivals, seek across the board pay raises unde the guise of merit increases, favor those of similar politics, or otherwise conflate a merit assessment with other purposes. Without a clear ideology adheared to by those who assess, its hard to imagine that any particular definition of merit would prevail.

Update:
Joanne Jacobs passes on this link to a California paper in which teachers elected everyone "teacher of the year" rather than select one meritorious teacher in protest of the very notion of merit pay.

Case closed.