http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303789604579198281053673534
Jack Welch, who was the CEO of GE and is the founder of the Jack Welch Management Institute at Strayer University, wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal to support Microsoft’s new evaluation system for employees’ performance. The concept behind this system is called “differentiation,” which allows the company to find out how much difference in goal setting and culture exists between employees and the company. Through evaluating the employees’ performance twice a year, and letting their employees know where they stand in the company, company officials believe that transparent grades—just like how well students do in a class— would advance a company’s mission and strengthen its core values once they can get rid of the bottom 10 percent.
After reading this article, I began wondering to what extent differentiation can be applied to employees of a professional bureaucracy, such as teachers working for a city’s department of education or professors employed by a university. In New York City, for instance, teachers are being evaluated under a new system imposed by the state Department of Education after the city failed to reach an agreement with the teacher’s union. The system ranks teachers on a scale of 1 to 4, with 1 meaning “ineffective” and 4, “highly effective.” After a series of observations, along with their students’ performance on standardized tests, each teacher will receive a grade from 0 to 100 at the end of the year.
While any system designed to improve worker performance is good for a company, I wonder who is really responsible for designing these assessments. Is it the teachers? Principals? Or outside consultants who may have studied a teacher teaches, but who themselves have never actually taught? Obviously, there will always be some push back when it comes to evaluation, but when assessments are imposed by faceless bureaucratic institutions that do not seek the input of employees, these evaluation systems always run the risk of being met with fierce resistance.
I also wondered about just how effective it is to arithmetically grade teachers based on how they arrange furniture in a classroom, for instance, or whether their students always call each other by name? It seems that even differentiation, while quantitative, acknowledges that much of how a worker functions in his or her workplace is also qualitative and cannot be expressed in the form of a letter or a numerical grade.
In response to this, I agree that this isn’t the best way to evaluate a teacher, in terms of specific implicit things that would be hard to quantify in a numerical grade. However, I do think it could give a general idea for some of the basic goals that a company is looking for. For instance, if a teacher scored very poorly, then it might be in the best interest of the school to monitor them, or at least look into why they may have scored so low.
I agree that the evaluation system for New York City teachers need to be reformed.
However, there is never going to be a 100% understanding between an employer and the employees because they are not going to understand the job completely. Instead, reasonable goals and performance measures are set to ensure that the employee is very capable at the job while understanding the mission of the organization.
For a professional bureaucracy, the metrics might be hard to establish, especially in the case of New York City teachers. I think that administrators have to use metrics that are reasonably in the control of the teachers, and not whether or not their students call each other by name. Acceptable metrics aren’t easy to agree upon, so the situation is bound to be a win-lose situation.