January 5, 2001

We Need Objective, Rigorous Peer Review of Teaching

By DANIEL BERNSTEIN and RICHARD EDWARDS

Remember formula funding? General-education reform? Total quality management? The history of higher education, like other fields, is littered with such managerial panaceas and educational cure-alls whose popularity has come and gone.

Those of us who were faculty members in the Massachusetts public system in the 1970's recall "Kelly points," so named for the powerful state senator James A. Kelly, who worried that faculty members were not working hard enough. You earned three points for