This book examines a policy that is one of the most powerful levers to improve teaching quality and advance teaching as a profession. Jennifer Goldstein presents the story of Rosemont, an urban district in California that created professional accountability with peer assistance and review (PAR), an alternative approach to teacher evaluation in which expert teachers evaluate their teacher peers.

The "big round table" in the author's childhood home was the place to eat and talk, the place where her parents engaged in after-dinner chess matches, the place where her father made simple repairs to, e.g., radios, lamps, etc. But in the author's memory it is, best of all, the place where her father told imaginative and engaging "tall tales" presented in a style characterized by humorous digressions, a warm confidentiality and a nonsensical logic that dared one not to believe what would seem to be unbelievable. In "Fish, Fog, Frogs (and other stories)" during a visit to her childhood home...