Making Sense of Distributed Leadership: The Case of Peer Assistance and Review

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].. American Educational Research Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. Because of editorial and production errors that occurred in the final version of this article, we are printing a corrected version below. So that the article will have a proper context we have also reprinted the introduction from that issue as well. We regret the errors. Because the editors of EEPA and AERA believe in high professional publishing standards, we offer this corrected version to our readers and set the record straight for the author. Please note that Winter 2003 was published under the editorship of James Spillane. This article explores a case of shifting leadership responsibility for teacher evaluation. Peer Assistance and Review (PAR)formally involves teachers in the summative evaluation of other teachers-although the boundaries of the involvement are often vague. Since teacher evaluation has traditionally been the domain of school principals, involving teachers in teacher evaluation raises questions about how those faced with the new role make sense of it and enact it. The article draws on theories of professions, organizations, and institutions to examine the implementati6n of PAR in one large urban school district. Findings suggest that, despite positive sentiments about the policy across stakeholder groups, those involved wanted principals to remain a centralfigure in the evaluation of teachers in PAR. Education's hierarchical norms, the difficulty of conducting evaluations, district leadership, and program ambiguity are identified as challenges to distributing leadership. TEACHER peer assistance and review (PAR) involves teachers in the summative evaluation of other teachers. While a variety of education policies increase teachers' leadership responsibility by placing them in such roles as mentors, curriculum developers, peer coaches, and researchers , only PAR increases teachers' formal authority by altering district organizational structures for teacher evaluation. As such, PAR challenges education's norms in particularly novel and potent ways.' This article examines PAR as a salient case of distributed leadership, a growing theoretical perspective with few empirical studies. I conducted this study of PAR during the first statewide implementation of the policy. In 1999, California Assembly Bill iX marked the …