This summer, 7-9-2010 to be exact, on NPR, I heard a review of Samuel Culbert’s book Get Rid of the Performance Review. Although Culbert’s book is aimed at the corporate world, I was struck by how many of his points seem relevant to the knotty problem of teacher evaluation. A summary of the story and further comments by Culbertson can be found at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128362511&ps=cprs
A touchy issue at the best of times, teacher evaluation has become an occasion of outright paranoia in this era of education “reform,” when Politicians, Pundits, Polemicists, and more than a few Professors, who of all people, ought to know better, seem united in the same chorus of “solutions.” Their ideas of “teacher accountability” seem to consist mostly of “slap those teachers into line, kick their butts, and fire more of them – a lot more of them.” Understandably, may teachers, even – especially – good ones become concerned, even fearful, wondering “How will I be evaluated, by whom, upon what criteria? Will I be set up to fail”? After all, as Culbert says, “employees … have a lot at stake – from a raise or a promotion to the general arc of their career.”
The point of relevance between the corporation and the public school system is that both are hierarchical organizations of bosses and the bossed. I must say that I do not see how all forms of evaluation should be abolished, nor should they be. And when Culbert says the performance evaluation should be abolished, that “nothing is better than something,” I think he means the evaluation as it is all too often practiced: a misguided institution that is “just plain bad management” and is often counterproductive.
Culbert calls the process “fraudulent.” It becomes a game, in which the employee tells the boss what he wants to hear and shows him what he wants to see. The employee is in a defensive position. The “boss” plays intimidation games to enhance his authority, because that is what he perceives that his boss wants to see. Employees are insecure about their careers; managers are insecure about their authority. This discourages the employee from speaking his mind, and it discourages the kind of “candid discussions about problems in the workplace – and their potential solutions,” the honest discourse that the organization needs to develop the new ideas necessary for improvement and progress.
I have seen how this works. For example, some years ago while I was a Building Representative, a distraught first year teacher came to me about her poor year-end evaluation. She had had her share of rookie problems. I had advised her to go to her supervisor for advice and assistance – of which she received little. Now, every Needs Improvement was “documented” with the comment “by her own admission.”
“Don’t get me wrong: Reviewing performance is good; it should happen every day. But employees need evaluations they can believe, not the fraudulent ones they receive. They need evaluations that are dictated by need, not a date on the calendar. They need evaluations that help them improve…”
As for using statistics (such as test scores) to evaluate performance, Culbert says “…one dimensional measurements can bring a new set of problems….Once you set up the metrics, that’s the only focus for the employee….not what … is necessary for the company [or school] to get the results that really matter.” Such narrow-spectrum evaluation can actually dumb down a curriculum by discouraging teachers from venturing out of safe (required) channels. It can partially absolve an administrator of the need to know an effective teacher when he sees one.
I know it is politically correct to look only at “output,” i.e. test scores and disparage “input,” i.e. things like funding, adequate physical plants, textbooks, curriculum, and, not least of all, what the teacher actually does in the classroom. I have observed that it is these inputs that are all-important. Without them, output – across the entire program – is unlikely to accrue.
So, if we do not do away with the performance review, exactly, let’s do away with the one-shot, year-end performance review as it is too often practiced. It is too easy for a lazy principal (they are at least as common as lazy teachers) to pay little attention to what his teachers are doing most of the year, as long as it does not cause him bother. Then, at the end, when he must pull a performance review out of the hat, it is too often based on a single observation and some arbitrary criteria, such as scores on this particular test or that. That is what needs to be abolished. It doesn’t serve “Reform,” much less the on-going business of the school. That is what we are better off without.