Duncan also sat on a mock intern board of review proceeding.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan on Sept. 7 praised a teacher peer-review system pioneered in Toledo, Ohio, calling the program an innovative system for evaluating teachers.

Duncan appeared at the Toledo Federation of Teachers’ headquarters as part of a Midwest bus tour highlighting education reforms and successful examples of labor-management collaboration. He expressed support for a program called the Toledo Plan, the first teacher peer-review system in the nation, over the traditional teacher evaluation system.

“I have tremendous respect for the work done in Toledo,” he said. “In far too many places around the country, teacher evaluation is broken.”

The Toledo Plan was developed in 1981 by then local union president Dal Lawrence. The core of the program is its intern system, into which all new Toledo Public School teachers could be entered.

Intern teachers are given an experienced teacher who acts as a mentor or consultant. This mentor teacher supports the intern through goal-setting and classroom visits, and he or she also evaluates the new teacher. The mentor then forwards a final evaluation and recommendation for either renewal or nonrenewal of the intern to an Intern Board of Review, which includes teachers and administrators.

Six intern board members are needed to reverse the mentor’s recommendation.

More than three decades old, the Toledo Plan has resulted in about 350 intern resignations or nonrenewals, according to Francine Lawrence—and the removal in some form of about 100 veteran teachers. And yet, she said, the program is the most popular initiative among Toledo teachers. Ms. Lawrence took over as the local union president for her husband, Dal, and recently resigned the post.

“This is a significant transformation of the culture of people who work in the schools,” she said.

Duncan said he’s followed the Toledo Plan for years, after meeting with the Lawrences when he was superintendent of the Chicago public school system and the district was revamping its teacher-evaluation system.