Grading the Teachers

Posted on September 9, 2010 by Mike

Politicians, Pundits, Polemicists, and Professors Who of All People Should Know Better, love to lament that “teachers unions reflexively reject anything that smacks of accountability.” Or so said Leonard Pitts of the Miami Herald, who usually hits the nail right on the head, but who, in this case, swatted my thumb with his hammer.  And I am sure it must seem so to readers and listeners, as the 4P’s present their case. But why is this true, if it is true? Why do the teachers’ unions so often seem “the party of no,” aside from the fact that the 4Ps get lots of mileage out of picturing them that way? Why might D. C. Superintendent Rhee, having “offered a significant raise and big bonuses for effective teachers in exchange for weakening tenure protections [have] to fight the union?” (Pitts)  Perhaps they saw this as a devil’s bargain, for reasons that are another topic for another day.  Why, when “The White House put up $4 billion in grant money to spur innovation in schools. It had to fight the unions?” (Pitts) Perhaps the unions, besides looking at the $4 billion, was also looking at deal-breaking strings attached thereunto. Perhaps they saw the White House as Greeks bearing gifts. Why might teachers and their unions distrust the earnest “C’mon, just trust us a little, why don’cha” entreaties of the Reformists. Well…

August 18, 2010, NPR’s All Things Considered ran a story, “’L. A. Times’ Series Examines Teacher Ratings.”  The NPR story says “The Los Angeles Times is taking a groundbreaking step as part of a series on teacher effectiveness. It is publishing the names of more than 6,000 teachers, along with ratings indicating how effective they have been in raising their students’ standardized test scores. The series explores one of the most controversial issues in public education today: how teachers should be measured. NPR’s Robert Siegel talks to one of the series’ co-authors, Los Angeles Times investigative reporter Jason Felch.” In the NPR interview, Felch says that since test scores are public records, the Times was entitled to publish them. No doubt they are, but what good is served is less clear.

The way the Times did so is a good example of why rating teachers on the basis of test scores makes many teachers nervous. Even as the 4Ps are crying “hold them teachers accountable” and “dump more (bad) teachers, Education Leaders are placating teachers’ fears with dulcet tones: “These high-stakes tests are to improve the quality of instruction only. We would never use them to compare individual teachers, much less to hold individual teachers up to public ridicule.”

Predictably, however, the Times article publishes scores not by aggregate, not by school, but by name.  Further, it compares two teachers, Miguel Aguilar, who is characterized as a good teacher, and, right down the hall, John Smith, a bad teacher. Whose picture is on the front page? Why John Smith, of course. (I sincerely hope the picture, like the name is a fake.)

Whose interests does this serve? How does it make anything better for anyone? How can John Smith hope to salvage his career? L. A. Unified won’t be able to keep him. Pukwana, South Dakota won’t dare touch him. I can just hear it now, what would transpire the next morning, Teacher: “Sit down, Suzy.” Suzy: “My father says he read in the paper that you are a bad teacher with nothing to offer me and I shouldn’t pay any attention to anything you say.” Is Suzy served? No, she has just been taught a sorry lesson.

Whose interests does this serve? The self-serving agendas of the Politicians, Pundits, Polemicists, and even some Professors, Who, Of All People, Should Know Better? No doubt. The megabuck corporate interests who circle like vultures to commercialize the remains of American public education once the Reformists have dismantled it? That is my personal paranoia.

Do you see why teachers and their unions can seem a distrustful bunch, “resistant to reform?”

The sad thing is that there is a question here that no one asks and answers that are out there for anyone, real reformers, who are willing to do the hard work of teasing them out. Why is Aguilar a better teacher than Smith? What, precisely, does one do that the other does not? What might one learn from the other? Do these men share their best practices? Do they even talk to each other? Does the system encourage them to do so and provide opportunity?

Right here, in this hallway shared by Aguilar and Smith is the place for meaningful change to begin. A philosophy of Continuous Improvement worked for postwar Japanese industry and brought that little nation from ruin to the second largest economy in the world. Continuous Improvement is the way of real “reform” (I am coming to hate the word). But it must happen school by school, teacher by teacher, and kid by kid. The 4Ps will tell you otherwise, but that is phony baloney.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/07/31/1755488/teacher-unions-fighting-accountability.html#ixzz0xBzoBPB4

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129282823&ps=cprs

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-teachers-value-20100815,0,2695044.story

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A Reasonable Reading of a Text

Posted on September 7, 2010 by Mike

As I sort through my folders of old e-mails, I occasionally come across something that I said pretty well and that  stands alone like a little essay without a lot of the context of the correspondence. Much of it is either union stuff or English teacher stuff or just general school stuff .  Here is something to a former colleague, now at another school. I decided not to publish this one in From the Files, although I suppose I could have:

I am sure you have encountered the problem of what constitutes a reasonable reading of a literary text. It took me over 40 years to get away from handing down my own interpretation, or some critic’s, as a pre-packaged received meaning. It seems to me, more and more, that meaning is a construct; to say that there is only one legitimate interpretation – the writer’s original authorial intent, whatever that is – seems to me increasingly dubious. I guess I can thank the likes of Louise Rosenblatt, Wayne Booth, and Kenneth Burke for this sorry state of affairs, as well as Driek Zirinsky and Gene Garver. As teachers of literature, it is our job to broaden the horizons and cultivate the tastes of young readers, and most fundamentally to guide them in the process of constructing meaning from text. The problem begins when the wise (guy) student says, “So it can mean just anything at all, then?” and you say, “Not quite!” From there, it gets really complicated to explain. The things that we do naturally, every day, and take for granted, are often the most difficult to explain. [But explain it we must, for that is the heart of the matter and a “teachable moment.”]  Among all the many negotiable variables, there is one constant: the text itself – ink on paper – words, words, words. And so, keep in mind this simple precept, borrowed (with liberties) from one of my favorite movies: The text abides, Dude!

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Digital School Books, Part One

Posted on September 6, 2010 by Mike

When I travel, I occasionally take a break from the local-wherever-I-am newspaper and indulge in USA Today. That’s how I came across the August 10 article “Learning Curve Goes Digital.” On the USA Today website, it is titled “Can college students learn as well on i-Pads, e-books?” http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2010-08-10-ebooklearning10_CV_N.htm The electronic “revolution” in school books seems to be mostly a post-secondary phenomenon at present, but likely it will come to a public school near you soon enough.

That got me to thinking about technology in general, books in particular, and school.

Technology and education have affected each other for millennia. I suspect the cave paintings at Lescaux must have had an educational function as well as a ritual one. And then there were cuneiform tablets and then papyrus and then parchment. While younger children learned and recited by rote, university students dutifully transcribed the book the professor read to them, so that when the course was done, they too would have a copy of the book. Not until the brothers Gutenberg felt pressed to invent movable type did school books as we know them today become possible. Even then, for the next few centuries, younger children learned mostly by rote and by recitation and with the aid of that new technology, the hand-held slate. All this was technology, but before my time.

By the 20th Century, things were starting to look pretty much like they do today, book-wise: standard primers like the McGuffey’s Reader (later, Dick and Jane), and a standard text for each subject in each grade. Printing may be technology, but it is not Technology as we think of it today, any more than is making pigments from colored earths. We will come back to books.

“Classroom Technology” began in the realm of Audio-Visual aids. Slide projectors, opaque projectors, filmstrip projectors, and 16mm film projectors that reliably jammed and broke the film at least once per showing came early on. I remember them from my school days. I do not remember an overhead projector ever being used in any public school I attended. In college, Dr. Rosine used one in Biology 101-102. It seemed very new-fangled, and I do not recall having one in my classroom until the late 1960s.

Classroom “Publishing” came in two flavors: the spirit duplicator or “ditto” machine and the mimeograph. The first, like its primitive ancestor the hectograph, was a dye transfer process; the latter was more akin to silk-screen printing. The first was relatively easy, but a master would yield only 100 or so copies before having to be re-typed and was good for only one use. The mimeograph was more complicated to operate, and stencils could be used multiple times, but they were very messy to store. Both of these technologies have been around for a very long time.

Copy technology was something new. Thermal copying processes came upon the scene about 1950, photo-copiers a decade later, although some years elapsed before either became available for use by teachers, at least in my part of the world. Early on, thermo-copiers seem to have been more prevalent. By about 1970, we had one in the office at Payette High School that would make ditto masters and mimeograph stencils, as well as copies, if you weren’t too picky about the appearance of the product. We weren’t encouraged to use it for routine batch copying, though, because it required special proprietary paper that was very expensive. When I started at Nampa High School in 1979, I was delighted to find that the office was equipped with a Xerox machine. Good-bye stinky and ephemeral spirit copies, good-bye messy mimeograph, good-bye expensive and crappy-looking thermal copies. I have not used any of the three for over 30 years and do not miss them.

The Xerox machine opened the door to a new set of issues that are coming into prominence only now, with the availability of more advanced technologies: intellectual property. Now it was possible for a teacher to augment the standard text with supplementary readings. It was possible to copy passages from books, magazine articles or portions thereof, news items, virtually anything that was black-and-white and would fit flat on the copier’s bed was fair game. Lazy teachers just pushed the button and ran off batches, showing page edges and all. Fussier types, like myself, would “edit” by trimming and cutting up the copies and pasting them up in the desired format before batch-copying; appearance benefited and less paper was wasted. I made a lot of supplemental readings this way, to go with whatever novel or unit I was teaching. It was far more cost effective than buying a whole book in order to use a few pages of it. I suppose we pushed the envelope of “fair use” at times. But I remember one Superintendent in the mid-1970s enthusing that he foresaw the day when it would no longer be necessary to buy textbooks because teachers would make all of their own materials. How did he expect us to do this? By playing fast and loose with copyright laws, no doubt.

The Personal Computer and widespread (but even today, not universal) access thereto brings us almost up to the present. I am not talking about the use of computers for students’ writing or the teaching of writing. That is another topic for another day and several more essays. I am talking about the access the internet affords students to all sorts of information. One administrator of my acquaintance would enthuse about how a student could go on line and get “The Information.” (I sometimes had an irrational urge to affect a Peter Lorre voice behind his back.) It has been a great boon to the writing of students’ research papers. That is the good news. The bad news is twofold. First, students become accustomed to relying entirely on Internet sources, largely ignoring more traditional print materials, a lazy habit that discourages thorough research. In the students’ defense it must be said that school libraries are often lacking in resources to support thorough research on topics meaningful to them. Second, it encourages simply cutting and pasting, a poor research habit at best. The niceties of rewriting the material to integrate it into the paper and crediting it to its source all are too easily lost. Most alarming, many administrators seem to be talking about precisely that – cut and paste – and they seem to consider that to be normal and even desirable.

A few years ago, during a negotiating session, the Board member across from the table was envisioning a day in the near future when books would be completely obsolete, because students could find anything they needed on the Internet. This man is now Idaho Superintendent of Public Instruction. And that brings us up to the “electronic revolution in school books” and the USA Today article.

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Raw Milk

Posted on August 20, 2010 by Mike

As I wrote this (now some days ago) I was listening to an NPR news story about the Raw Milk Revolution, and government suppression of it by force of arms – it seems that armed federal officers destroyed inventories  of raw milk, like revenuers destroying barrels of moonshine – and the surrounding controversy. A tempest in a teapot? Perhaps.

When I buy milk at the local Winco, I am glad that is pasteurized and inspected and that the Department of Agriculture supervises the dairy industry. You don’t have to read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle to know why, although that sure is a good reminder.

My mother began her teaching career at a one-room country school in north-central Nebraska in the 1920’s. Much of the school year, she was able to commute between the family home in town and her school, by horse and by a much-used Model T, bought for $25.00. But in deepest winter, this was impractical, and she boarded with a farm family near the school. Evidently, their cow was infected, and she contracted undulant fever (brucellosis). I remember that as late as the 1950’s, she was still suffering recurring attacks and that our family physician seemed to be single-handedly supporting the pharmaceutical industry, trying every new antibiotic that came down the pike. Either something eventually worked, or else she simply wore out the disease.

Nevertheless, during the years I taught in Payette, Idaho, we bought raw milk from a local dairy. At first, I had misgivings, but the farmer was also the local veterinarian, so my wife reasoned that his cows were healthy if any were. I have never drunk better milk. It was Jersey milk, un-homogenized and very rich in cream. We would skim off most of the cream. We could brew our coffee strong and tame it with a goodly glug of thick cream. The cream accumulated and found other uses. It whipped beautifully. We pressed an antique hand-crank churn into service and began to make much of our own butter. Eventually, we moved away, and I suspect that this milk is no longer available, but I still miss it.

I realize that the hand of “Big Gummint” can be heavy. I suspect that many of the Raw Milk Revolutionaries are mere food faddists for whom raw milk is just the next big thing. A tempest in a teapot? Perhaps. But here, as in Education Reform, a little common sense would go a long way.

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Denver Schools’ Test Scores

Posted on August 13, 2010 by Mike

One of the benefits of travel lies in reading newspapers from other parts of the country and learning what is going on there. So it was that when I opened the Denver Post of August 11, 2010, I saw the headline, “No gains on CSAPs.” The sub-head sums it up: “Despite high-profile efforts at reform, Colorado schools’ proficiency rates have stayed flat in recent years.” http://www.denverpost.com/education/ci_15736900

Things could (and should) have been better – scores up. On the other hand, things could have been worse – scores down. As it is, some great inertia held things on a more-or-less steady course, for better and for worse. It seems to me that in the first case, education leaders (rank-and-file, too) would have done well to leave off patting themselves on the back and have asked themselves “What, specifically, are we doing that is effective, how might we build on that strength, and how might we extend the same principles, where appropriate, to other areas.” In the second case, education leaders (rank-and-file, too) would have done well to leave off gnashing their teeth, rending their garments, and pointing their fingers at each other and have asked themselves “What, specifically, aren’t we doing that we might productively do, and/or what are we doing that is counter-productive, which therefore we should cease.” The third and present case is more complicated because both sets of questions apply equally and simultaneously. Reason would seem to dictate such approaches, complicated, tedious, and difficult though they may be.

But on the Opinion page, reason goes out the window, as it usually does when Politicians, Pundits, Polemicists, and Professors Who, of All People Ought to Know Better, begin to Pronounce. “Flat CSAP scores another sign that reform is crucial.” http://www.denverpost.com/editorials/ci_15737495 Again, the sub-head sums it up: “Those who have been fighting education-reform efforts in Colorado are perpetuating a system that is not improving.” There you have it. Test scores are not improving because, although there are heroes who are valiantly fighting for education reform, there are villains who, for their own base motives, are cravenly fighting those noble efforts. This is good rhetoric. It is good argumentum ad populum. It reduces all sorts of complex issues to one: heroes vs. villains. People love heroes. People love to hate villains. People love the solidarity of “You’re with us or you’re against us.” This may be good rhetoric, but it is dubious basis for intelligent public policy. “For every complex problem there is a simple solution that is wrong.”

And so it is that we have “Those who found every way possible to criticize recent reform efforts would, essentially, perpetuate the same system that produced these scores, with the exception of putting more money into it.” The “villains’” motives would seem to be obstruction for the sheer hatred of anything better, as well as monetary interest. How despicable! Who are these villains? Teachers’ unions, no doubt.

“The state is counting on a range of reforms.” Some of these reform efforts are potentially worthwhile, “strategies to train Colorado’s 40,000 teachers in the state’s recently passed education standards,” for example. I would like to think that would include training teachers in working with students to achieve the standards. As a teacher of 44 years, I can see how this could accomplish good things. But we come back to other, more predictable standards of Reformist 4Ps such as “linking teacher evaluations to student academic progress.” There are lots of ways that student performance can and should be factored in to teacher evaluations, and ways evaluations can be factored into teacher compensation plans. The 4Ps usually preach “Pay for Performance” (the term “Merit Pay” having become shop-worn), by which they mean that a teacher’s pay should be directly tied to his students’ scores on the most recent standardized tests. Such an approach is simplistic, and where implemented generally creates more problems than it solves. (There are other approaches. For a starting point, see the Consortium for Policy Research in Education’s Teacher Compensation Research. http://cpre.wceruw.org/tcomp/research/index.php They tend, however, to lack the ideological directness craved by the Reformist 4Ps)

A news story that should be a springboard to rational discussion and considered action becomes, instead, an occasion for yet one more “Reformist” polemic.

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Educational Accountability

Posted on August 3, 2010 by Mike

I am not a Politician, a Pundit, a Polemicist, or a Professor. I have never run for public office nor do I have a Ph. D., so I do not belong to those two clubs, and the middle two would not want to own me. After all, I was only a lowly classroom teacher for 44 years, so what do I know? The 4 P’s (Politicians, Pundits, Polemicists, and Professors Who Should Know Better), after all, see things “from a distance.” They can look past troublesome causes and complications and see simple solutions that sound good. The problem is that according to a favorite proverb (I owe it to H. L. Mencken, I think), “For every complex problem there is a simple solution that is wrong.”

But all too often, when I read something by one of the 4 P’s pronouncing upon American education and Education Reform, I know they have it wrong. How do I know? Because I have confidence in my 44 years in the trenches as a great Reality Check, that’s how. The 4 P’s see things from a distance; I have seen them up close.

I have before me Leonard Pitts’ column of 8-3-2010, “It’s time for us to embrace educational accountability.” (I try to provide links whenever I can, but as I write this, my browser is doing strange things and won’t let me.) I have nothing against accountability. There ought to be more of it, by golly. In all my years of teaching, it never occurred to me that I wasn’t being held accountable. But I do get tired of the way the 4 P’s co-opt the word “accountability” and wave it about like a bloody flag.

Pitts’ thesis is that “school principals should have the power to fire teachers who do not perform.” Attached to this is the contention that “union protections being what they are, dumping a bad teacher – even a bad one – is an almost impossible task.”

Because Mr. Pitts is a nationally syndicated Pundit, he sees things from a lofty distance, simply, and he has just presented us with two major over simplifications. The problem is that once an oversimplification passes over into “conventional wisdom” where it is codified as “standardized error,” it becomes a falsehood. Misinformation becomes disinformation.

The professor of my Personnel class in my Administrator’s Certification program, a seasoned Superintendent, once told us “The principal who says he can’t get rid of a bad teacher is not doing his job – is not paying attention or is just plain lazy.” Throughout my career, during much of which I was a union building representative, I have observed that Dr. Chatburn was correct. Now, strictly speaking, in most states and districts, it is oversimplification to say the principal actually fires the teacher. The principal monitors the teacher, observes and documents his performance and/or behavior, and at the appropriate time recommends to the board that the teacher’s contract be renewed – or not, if he has been incompetent, derelict, or guilty of unprofessional conduct. In the case of really egregious conduct, the principal may even be able to suspend the teacher, pending a hearing before the board. But the principal does not directly fire the teacher, nor should he be able to do so. If the principal has been doing his job, and if the board is smart, they will pay close attention to the principal’s reasons for wanting to let the teacher go, as they did for the principal’s reasons for wanting to hire the teacher in the first place. (Whether the principal has any say over new hires into his building is another issue for another day.)

All of this is usually spelled out in the Master Contract, within parameters established by state law. It is the union’s job to see to it that all is done “by the book,” that the teacher has representation, that his side of a dispute is heard, that no teacher is deprived of his livelihood and his reputation except for just cause. The administration that fires a teacher just because it seems like the expedient thing to do is doing no one any favor, nor is the union that defends the indefensible.

My poster-child case is the English teacher who found her head on the block because she flunked a star athlete for refusing to do a required research paper. This brought the wrath of the boosters down on the administration. It appeared expedient to dump her. Did this make her a bad teacher? In the end, the union was able to negotiate a compromise “improvement plan.” Did the union thwart accountability? Or did it wimp out and do a bad turn for a teacher who was only trying to do the right thing? Admittedly, this was an extreme case, and a ludicrous one, but representative of some important issues, I think.

The right thing. What is The Right Thing? Who should be held accountable for what? How should they be held accountable, and by whom? What is a good teacher? Just the one whose students crank out good scores at test time? How does a principal know a good teacher, or a bad one, when he sees one? All this gets complicated quickly, but there is nothing simple about the American public education enterprise, its constituency, or the children it serves, no matter what the 4P’s would have us believe. Public educations interests are no more served by dumping teachers than by keeping bad one. The trick is to know the difference.

I cringe when a respected journalist talks about “dumping” teachers, when administrators brag about how many teachers they are firing, when I see on the cover of a major news magazine a picture of a principal swaggering down the hall of his high school carrying a baseball bat. This sort of “heroic” ideological posturing serves no one.

Posted in Education Reform, Teacher Accountability, Teacher's Unions | 1 Comment

Math Requirements

Posted on July 26, 2010 by Mike

Math Requirements

A few days ago, a high school friend in South Dakota sent me an interesting link: http://www.school-of-thought.net/?p=868.   Fred Deutsch is a school board member from Watertown, South Dakota. This particular post discusses South Dakota’s new graduation requirements.

According to new legislation, beginning with 2010’s incoming freshmen, each student will be required to complete at least three units of math: Algebra I and II and Geometry. The board may waive these course requirements in lieu of other courses of equal or greater rigor, if I understand correctly. The idea is “a single curriculum designed to prepare South Dakota students for college… The current changes adopted by the state board eliminates [sic] the ‘basic’ route to graduation as well as increases the academic rigor of the new route.”

I applaud – in principle – as I applaud anything that contributes to the continuous improvement of our nation’s public schools. But I have serious reservations, philosophically and practically, about school “reform” as it too often plays today. Deutsch expresses reservations that largely parallel my own: “I have mixed emotions about the changes.  Improving rigor is good.  Requiring all students to stay in school to age 18 is good. Putting the two together probably isn’t.” my friend, who sent me the link, puts it less kindly: “These newly-mandated requirements make my ass tired, just reading about them.  All of a sudden, all these ignorant mutts (like me) are going to be able to handle 2 yrs of algebra, physics, chemistry, etc?  What planet are these assholes on?”

I think I am more optimistic – in principle, anyway. What matters are the practicalities of the proposition, how things are done. “The devil is in the details … where the rubber meets the road.” I am pessimistic on the other hand, because the “reform” preached by Politicians, Pundits, Polemicists, and Professors Who Should Know Better is too often of the “one size fits all” variety. NCLB (No Child Left Behind) is a prime example. But kids, and for that matter schools, are not all the same. None of this is as simple as we are led to believe.

Let’s look at the math requirement, for example. Is the idea to teach more math to more students? Or is to teach it more rigorously? Most would agree that if more students are taking more math, that it must be somehow dumbed down. Conversely, more rigor implies that more less able students are being culled along the way. Mr. Deutsch seems to suggest that we can’t have it both ways. And we probably can’t, at least the way math has been traditionally taught. I don’t see a lot of difference from when I was in high school, more than 50 years ago. Over the years, I have put this question to numerous math teachers, and usually they just shrug, and say “Well, not everyone has the mental horsepower to do math.” Indeed, it seems that there are two kinds of students: those who “get” math, and those who don’t. And each year, the number of those who “get” the next, more advanced course grows smaller.

Must it necessarily be this way? Are there other approaches to math curriculum? That is the essential question, the elephant in the room. Unfortunately, Reformers seem not much interested in such trivial details as elephants.

I must say at this point that, like my friend, I was less than a stellar math student, but not for lack of trying. Over 50 years later, the thought of being marched into the blazing guns of Algebra 2, having barely passed Algebra 1, makes me queasy in the pit of my stomach. I relate my brief career in math and further thoughts on the teaching of math in an essay from several years ago. See Math in From the Files.

Posted in Current Posts | 1 Comment

Performance Reviews

Posted on July 9, 2010 by Mike

This morning, 7-9-2010, 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.

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THE PEAVINE QUARTER – PRELUDE

Posted on July 6, 2010 by Mike

Welcome to my new blog, The Peavine Quarter. These early posts will be mostly “Why I Went to the Woods” stuff.

Call me Mike Steiner, because that is my name. I am now retired, having taught mostly English and mostly in public secondary schools for 44 years. And so it is, finding myself without a venue, without an audience, and without a soapbox (which is to say, without a class, without a faculty room, and without a bargaining table), I have resolved to remedy that situation.

Education, American public schools, the teaching profession, and pedagogy will be recurring themes. Topics literary and cinematic will not be strangers here, and maybe other matters too, as they seem important at the time. Enough about myself – for now.

This is not The Peavine Quarterly. The title is no reference to format or frequency of publication. It is a literary allusion to a place that is, or was, actual, but more important, is a fictional place, a place of the mind.

” …while in north Reno, her [Mt. Rose’s] reign is strongly    contested by black Peavine Mountain, less austere, wilder, and the home of two winds. Mt. Rose is the detached goal of the spirit, requiring a lofty and difficult worship. Peavine is the great, humped child of the desert. He is barren, and often lowering, but he reaches out and brings unto him while Mt. Rose stands aloof… Rose begets reverence, but Peavine begets love. There is liveliness in this quarter that gets into everything.” (Clark, Walter VanTilburg, The City of Trembling Leaves 7,8)

It has been many years since I lived in Reno, and then it was first on Court Street and then just north of Wingfield Park, so the Peavine Quarter is, as I say, a place of the mind.

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