The Washington Post reports today about a program of teacher evaluations being used in Mongomery County Schools to identify struggling teachers, assist them in improving their craft or dismiss them.  The system of review pairs the struggling teacher with a mentor whose full-time job is to assist other teachers in reaching their full potential.  If the teacher makes satisfactory strides of improvement, it's back to the classroom.  If the teacher fails to improve or refuses to participate, they face a panel of peers, teachers and principals, who will decide their fate.  From experience, teacher evaluations are not an accurate reflection of their day-in, day-out classroom style.  As most people would under the microscope, teachers will pull out all the stops on evaluation day.  They present their best lessons, clean their classrooms, sometimes even bribe their students with candy or extra credit (I've only heard rumors of this one, never done it myself!) all to insure that they recieve a stellar evaluation.  Of course, for those conscientious professionals who are always looking to improve for the benefit of those they teach, evaluation days are reality and rarely produce any concrete feedback that will in fact assist the teacher in improving.  So while I think the teacher evaluations followed by an exhaustive mentoring program will produce more effective educators, there are some who are definitely still slipping under the radar.  I have worked in several school systems, all of which have implemented a mentoring program designed to assist new teachers.  Not once have I recieved qualified, appropriate, or timely advice from one of those mentors.  Sure they were nice people, and very good in their own classrooms but as a foreign language teacher who questioned whether to first introduce students to conversation elements or grammar rules, they could not help me.  They could tell me where the copy paper was, how to fill out a purchase order, even give some marginal advice on how to plan a field trip, but their efforts made no impact on my classroom.  However, the mentor program described in the article by the Post sounds much more complete.  Part of the reason why my previous mentor experiences were unsuccessful is because those teachers also had classes of their own.  Teaching is an energy consumming profession.  I know that these teachers, though willing to help, had to focus on their students and their curriculum.  They were stretched thin to begin with.  The Montgomery system that uses mentors whose sole responsibility is to mentor is a much more effective approach.