For the past 11 years, Montgomery County (Maryland) Schools have been running a Peer Assistance and Review (PAR) program to evaluate public school teachers.
Since the program began, more than 500 teachers have either been fired or chosen to leave the system. In the 10 years prior to the program, five teachers were fired.
According to recent coverage of the program, several hundred teachers are used to mentor struggling teachers in the public school system. If mentoring fails, a PAR panel—made up of equal numbers of teachers and administrators—can vote to remove the teacher. This past February, the system was identified as one of 12 to be featured at a Department of Education conference on labor-management collaboration.
The results have been impressive. With one-third of its students in the low-income category, Montgomery County still sends 84 percent of its students to college. Along those same lines, Montgomery County educates 2.5 percent of all African-American students who pass an Advance Placement test in the U.S.—more than five times its share.
However, because PAR does not take into account student scores when evaluating teachers, it is not eligible for “Race to the Top” grants from the DoE.
Original coverage from The New York Times is available.
The Montgomery County Public Schools site is available, where it has posted information about the PAR program.
Related information on PAR programs is also available from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, as is data specific to the Montgomery County program.
A downloadable PDF from the Center for American Progress, which cites Montgomery County and other regions, is also available.