One of the reasons that some folks would like teachers to be judged by tests is because they feel other methods (teacher observation, etc.) are too subjective. This recently got a re-run in a “best of” post from Killian Betlach, and it brings up some issues I’ve had with “accountability” in teaching.

Someone wasn’t doing their job where this man taught. We’re both in California. That means that you have formal observations every other year for at least the first 10 years you teach, and every year when you are untenured (the first two years in a district). These include a number of informal observations as well. I have been formally observed EVERY year of my teaching career because I changed districts or school sites, making me untenured or subject to revaluation a lot. The years I was tenured, or didn’t change sites, my “number” came up for a Stull Act evaluation. In addition to doing two formal evaluations there are a number of informal walk-throughs done for all teachers (both at my current and former school site). I already have 5 of them for this year (keep in mind my Asst. Principal who is doing my formal evaluation was out of the office for about 5 weeks between his mother’s funeral, and covering in a class with a vacancy). I would say this varies and to say all urban schools fall into the practice of not doing regular walk-throughs is inaccurate.

I don’t want to seem harsh, but I think a lot of the hand-wringing about “lack of accountability” in teaching from younger teachers is because they are unaware of how unaccountable evaluations can be in any professional job. You are often measuring something that is unmeasurable. If your job experience up to entering teaching is centered on making sandwiches, working in sales, or customer service, those are all business where you get pretty instant feedback. Fast food places track how quickly customers are served and work those numbers. It’s obvious when your sales are not meeting a target. Customer service is full of metrics like response time, number of problems resolved, and customer feedback, BUT even those systems can be gamed. I remember a recent conversation with a friend about an early job she had at an insurance company where they needed to re-file customer files. They were rated on how many piles they eliminated. Some workers would “stuff” the files anywhere to get rid of them. Some would “cherry pick” the piles. But, these are not professional jobs, what about those?

Generally in a business you have two types of departments, cost centers (they cost money to run, and don’t have a direct revenue stream), and revenue centers. Folks in revenue centers get measured on dollars. For instance, when I was at Wells Fargo they looked at the ROA, return on assets, and ROE, return on equity, that departments and individuals generated. Most of what I worked in were cost centers. They tried to make us more efficient by having us “bill out” to the departments we supported, but really we weren’t on subject to the numbers near as much as the revenue folks. Teaching is like working in a cost center, and the evaluations there are pretty darn subjective. If Killian and others are complaining about a lack of accountability in teaching, it’s endemic to jobs that don’t involve taking in money.

Here is my discussion with my BIL who is a manager at a large computer software company that would be easily recognized if I shared the name:

ME: Do you have an evaluation instrument? Does it have a numeric scale?

BIL: Yes, it goes from 1 to 5 with one as the lowest value.

ME: Do you have guidelines for each value?

BIL: Yes, there are examples, and the “higher-up” you are in job grade, the higher the expectations, also the employee can add comments to what I put down and that is included in their HR file.

ME: Well, those are all the same in the forms used in my evaluations, and the contract specifies that I can add comments too. Is this an objective measure?

BIL: No, it is subjective. Really, how well you are doing has a lot to do with your manager and how well you get along with them. I spend a lot of time on these evaluations (about 10 hours per employee for a total of 100 hours a year). First, the subjects evaluate themselves, and we agree on objectives in advance that are SMART (specific, measurable, realistic and timely), but how I see their work is not always the same as how someone else would see it.

So this looks a lot like the world I am evaluated in, except that I also get periodic walk-throughs whereas BIL only talks to employees once a year. The only area that is different is that you can go up in job grades, and your objectives go up with that. I don’t know if merit pay would settle this issue, but I would not rule it out. I think with a lot of these things, who you are working with is a big deal. BIL felt (based on my experience, and the experience of my sister as teachers, and numerous other friends in the business) that having a bad manager (principal) in teaching was worse than in a large business because it is harder to “move around” and escape.

I will share that the time in my professional life when I felt the most isolated, and felt like I was not being adequately managed/supervised did not occur when I was teaching, but when I was working as the only person doing my job at a division of a large financial company in the middle of a merger. I was a low priority, was shuffled around on the organizational chart, and basically was left alone too much. The job was also at odds with a lot of my personal beliefs. Happily, that and getting my retirement vested, led to my making the break and looking for a new career that led to the teaching profession. My point, you can have Killian’s career crisis an just about any job. I do not believe there is anything endemic about that feeling of isolation in teaching. He appeared to be working in one site that had become dysfunctional for most or all of his career as a classroom teacher. If I stayed in the site I used to work in like that, I’d feel the same way. The question is do you still feel that way when you move to a new place in the same company or business (as I did in banking)?

My own feeling is that contract rules, labor law, and traditions in education worsen the situation because it discourages leaving a site. As someone who has moved around a lot, it’s not as easy as it was in the business world, and at a certain point, I will be “punished” (forced to take a pay cut) if I switch to a different district. In a few more years, I will be “stuck” in my district unless I want to take a cut, because other districts often don’t recognize more than 7 or 10 years of service on the pay scale. I think we need to think about job mobility, but that often involves trade-offs in job security which can be hard to give up.