Established in the 142,000-student Montgomery County, Maryland, district in 1999, peer assistance and review (PAR)--or "peer review," as it is occasionally called--is actually an old idea. In 1981, the then-president of the Toledo Federation of Teachers, Dal Lawrence, helped create the first PAR program. Almost 30 years later, only a…

This article reports on how states strive to overhaul their teacher tenure policies. Over the past year, a handful of states have begun to overhaul their tenure-granting processes by increasing the number of years it takes teachers to win due process rights, and by trying to improve the evaluations that are supposed to guide determinations of…

Education programs across 19 states are piloting a performance-based assessment for teacher-candidates that potentially could serve as a common prelicensing measure for new teachers. Based on a test in use in about 30 education schools in California, the Teacher Performance Assessment includes a "teaching event" requiring teachers to…

With conversations about the best ways to evaluate teacher performance proliferating across the nation, preservice preparation could be the next stop on the teacher-quality continuum to receive a similarly high level of scrutiny. New models for preparing teachers, such as the yearlong apprenticeship or "residency" model, have received…