Peer assistance and review

Peer Assistance and Review (PAR), a program in which Consulting Teachers (CTs) provide support for and then evaluate their peers, requires a unique labor-management collaboration because it brings together members of the teachers union and administration to focus on improving teacher quality. PAR requires that CTs and principals share evaluation responsibilities for teachers in the program. This process not only counteracts many of the norms of teaching as a "closed door" profession, but the structure of PAR requires that teachers and administrators blur the lines between their traditional responsibilities, coming together to make difficult decisions that can determine a teacher's future employment. Within the context of a larger qualitative study conducted by the Project on the Next Generation of Teachers, this study investigates the complex labor-management relationships in seven districts that have designed and implemented PAR in order to determine what it takes to make PAR work. These districts range in age from very new (2005) to long-running (1982), providing an opportunity to examine the labor-management relationships over time at both the district level and the school level. This study finds that PAR changes the labor-management relationship at the district level among those involved on the PAR Panel, the program's governing board. The Panel is highly structured, adopting explicit procedures that enable teachers and administrators to collaborate. Further, this study also finds that PAR changes the labor-management relationship between teachers and principals at the school. At this level, structures and procedures are not well-defined, and there is often confusion among principals and CTs about how to share evaluation responsibilities for teachers in PAR.

This study finds that PAR's structures are especially important at the time of initial implementation and in PAR's early years, as they provide a way in which people can interact as they take on and share evaluation responsibilities. As programs mature, sometimes PAR encourages labor and management to collaborate in ways that go beyond the PAR program. Other times, PAR remains an isolated reform. Either way, in these districts PAR was stable and protected as other programs lost funding and other facets of the labor-management relationship deteriorated.