If you want to press a hot button inside or outside the hallowed halls of public education, teacher evaluation would be the one almost guaranteed to light up the "Emergency!" display on every teachers' union office desk.
Yet of the 5,000 or so parent and community responses received on the Ministry of Education's website set up to gauge reaction to B.C.'s proposed Education Plan, teacher evaluation ranked a distant third after flexibility and choice in learning (35 per cent) and teacher assistants (25 per cent) as issues needing to be addressed.
Teacher evaluation as an eminent concern generated only 10 per cent of responses, many of which were suggestions as to how evaluations could be conducted and parents be involved.
While that relatively low level of concern speaks well of B.C's teachers and the job they do in classrooms, teacher evaluation is an issue that continues to trouble the profession itself and is probably one aspect of professional practice in public education that remains a contentious labourrelations issue.
Anything except a positive teacher evaluation inevitably triggers a lengthy time-and-energy-draining grievance procedure to the extent that writing a "less than satisfactory" report is viewed by too many principals as more trouble than it's worth.
Specific Ministry of Education website responses about teacher evaluation included allowing exemplary "master" teachers to perform these evaluations, because in the view of those responding, master teachers are likely to be more qualified to evaluate their peers than administrators.
That's not a new idea. In fact, it is one which has been in use by 60 or so U.S. school districts and an idea that originally came from an unexpected source.
In 1985, Albert Shanker, the powerful fire-breathing president of the American Federation of Teachers, the nation's second-largest teachers' union, recognized a union responsibility to redevelop public confidence in U.S. public education and made a compelling case for union support of rigorous, peer-driven teacher evaluations.
"We don't have the right to be called professionals - and we will never convince the public that we are," Shanker told an astounded union convention in Niagara Falls, New York, "unless we are prepared honestly to decide what constitutes competence in our profession and what constitutes incompetence and apply those definitions to ourselves and our colleagues."
It wasn't even a new idea.
In 1981, the Toledo Federation of Teachers, an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers, successfully negotiated the first peer-evaluation system of its kind in the U.S.
The underlying assumption of this program was that experienced teachers were best qualified and positioned to screen new entrants into the profession. Experienced teachers were identified as being the best bet to be consultants and mentors, especially for first-year teachers.
According to the TFT, the purpose of the Toledo Plan, and this in a district of 22,000 students, was to meet the unique needs of first-year teachers through contact with experienced colleagues who support, encourage and finally evaluate the efforts of newbie teachers.
In the five years before the implementation of the Toledo Plan in 1981, only one new teacher was terminated.
In the most recent five years of the program, 392 interns have been evaluated, 33 interns were non-renewed or terminated, almost 10 per cent.
Beyond that, a "peer intervention" program is designed to assist and evaluate non-probationary teachers (third year teachers and beyond) who have been identified as performing in a way so unsatisfactory that termination or improvement may be the only options.
A consultant colleague is assigned to the identified teacher, and the goal of the intervention is an improvement in performance to an acceptable level.
What effect has all this had on student achievement? In this large multiracial district, that's hard to gauge, given the mind-numbing data-collection systems that first grew out of the Bush administration's "No Child Left Behind" funding-for-results fiasco, and which continues as a mega-intrusive feature of some U.S. school district bureaucracies with the Obama administration's "Race to the Top" imperatives.
But the Toledo teachers' union and the district administration still agree that with a history of working together focused on effective teacher development, other problems can be solved and public education will be moving in the right direction.
Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.
