Teachers evaluating teachers

As a writer on education reform, Myron Lieberman has criticized America's two largest teacher organizations - the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) - for standing in the way of needed improvement in our system of public education. 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 the teacher unions themselves, and their local affiliates, assume responsibility for ensuring teacher competence by instituting peer review systems. In Teachers Evaluating Teachers, Lieberman explores the peer review phenomenon and the teacher unions' stake in perpetuating it. 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 tests have improved in districts with peer review. Indeed, Lieberman shows that peer review has had little or no impact on the number of teachers dismissed on grounds of poor performance.