![]() ![]() I don’t yet know who the principal has hired to replace them, but I’m guessing many will be TFA types (we also have a TFA-style program here called Memphis Teaching Fellows, run by The New Teacher Project), most of whom will be ineffective their first year. Already, nearly all of the K-3 teachers at my failing school have transferred to other schools with better school-wide value-added scores. This is clearly designed to make the bad schools worse. teacher, and librarian, instead of using their students’ value-added scores for half of their evaluation (because there aren’t any), is assigned their school’s value-added score for half of their evaluation. In addition to the injustice of using test scores at all in making personnel decisions, K-3 teachers are evaluated based on the test scores of students they have never taught.Įvery teacher in Tennessee who teaches K-3 and every art, music, P.E. ![]() I teach in one of the grades K-3 in Memphis. What teacher would want to work in that sort of system? ![]() Then what? Fire good teachers you’ve scored “ineffective” in the hopes of hiring even better teachers? Great idea. If there were, that district’s HR department would deserve getting canned first.īut let’s assume 20% is actually a solid estimate. There is not a school system in America with 1/5 of its workforce comprised of bad teachers. – The teacher evaluation is used as the basis for professional development, decisions about who teaches, and compensation.”Įven if the distribution recommendation is simply hypothetical, it’s pathetic. – A meaningful distribution of teacher evaluation scores-approximately 20% evaluated 1s and 2s and less than 20% evaluated 5s 56 of the Transition Planning Commission’s recommendations regarding the Memphis merger: Economist Eric Hanushek has proposed that 5-10% of teachers (based on the test scores of their students) be fired and replaced by “average” teachers he says this will produce incredible results: we will rise to the top of the international rankings and the economy will expand by trillions, just by firing those teachers.Ī reader in Memphis noticed that the plan of the Transition Planning Committee (led by Stand for Children and advised by the Boston Consulting Group) proposes stack ranking of teachers:įrom p. The bell curve decrees that a certain percentage are at the bottom, no matter how effective they are. Many of the new state evaluation systems, designed in response to Race to the Top (a font of untested ideas), will evaluate teachers and principals on a bell curve. Something similar is happening now in education. At Enron it was called “rank and yank.” Jack Welch of GE championed the idea of finding and firing the laggards. I discovered that many major corporations have a similar rating system. I printed comments by people who had been subject to this system, who said that it stifled creativity and collaboration. ![]() However, if the aim is to have your employees work together and help one another, then another method for measuring performance is preferable.I wrote a blog about the culture at Microsoft, where employees are evaluated by “stack ranking,” meaning that everyone in every unit is assigned a weighting–best, average, worse. A cutthroat environment: If you want to create an environment of competition inside the workplace, then ranking should work just fine.If they have other duties, such as keeping customers happy or supervising junior staff members, then it is grossly unfair to rank the employee on only one, narrow aspect of his job. Narrow job descriptions: Ranking works if nothing else is expected of the employee other than to perform the narrow criteria you use to assess them.There needs to be a check in the system that combines the ranking system with other performance measures to get a more holistic view. A second pair of eyes: There's no point having a ranking system if your top-ranked performer got there by sabotaging her colleagues and generally having a negative effect on those around her.Precise criteria to compare employees: Ranking criteria should be objective and measurable, such as money earned or clients referred, not subjective like is good with clients or is a team player. ![]()
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