quote:No, it doesn't, not for the sorts of things that should be evaluated in annualized job reviews. What's more, excepting the reviews intended to assess people having achieved certain minimal, relatively well defined standards, I can think of few processes in university reviewing that aren't subject to some of the most obscene politicking I have ever seen.
How long have you been a member of the faculty at a University?
I can think some cases where University reviews were subject to some pretty obscene politics but in my experience these are the exception rather than the rule. I actually ended up leaving the University of Utah as the result of one of these. But in my case, the obscene politics was at the administrative level, the faculty committee reviews worked just fine. In my experience, some University departments have very nasty internal politics but the further you get removed from the department level, the more objective the committees become.
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Actually, I'd be fine with some sort of process like you suggest making decisions in the form of ordering considerations among a limited number of candidates chosen by supervisors, and then the administrator would have to fire from the bottom of the list.
Though I'm still not sure when these evaluating teachers are going to have time to do classroom evaluations and perform the whole evaluation process, and where they're going to get enough of the better teachers from other school districts to evaluate all the decisions that need to be made -- even a quite small city (perhaps 3500 high school students) school district has dozens of firing decisions to be made every year. I'm quite sure such evaluations would be most of a full time job for an administrator at even a mid-sized school, and I'm not certain how a small number of outside teachers could perform the same evaluations in even a few weeks, which would still be drastically less time spent on the task
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quote:How long have you been a member of the faculty at a University?
Staff, mostly watching (and hearing, as I had some good sources on multiple sides of some of the best issues) in amusement.
quote:In my experience, some University departments have very nasty internal politics but the further you get removed from the department level, the more objective the committees become.
But we're not talking about high level policy choices (which are mostly made in fact by university administrators who have final authority, not the committees who advise them, coincidentally). We're talking about exactly the sorts of decisions that are made at department level in universities, that lead to the worst sorts of politics.
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quote:Originally posted by fugu13: Teachers unions are some of the largest and most successful political lobbies in the US. In most of the US by population, teachers unions are extremely strong.
Please provide some evidence to support this. If teachers unions are so strong, why haven't they been able to get better salaries and more reasonable teaching loads? Are these not union priorities?
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quote:Do you really think what you are proposing will change that?
What I am proposing? Heck yeah. Supervisors fire more senior employees who haven't kept up with experience, or are just not doing so well at their job, or have other problems, all the time. Sure, there will be times it's just the new people who are fired, but right now it is always the new people who are fired, and that's a very bad thing -- it makes it much harder to get a start in education.
Most business and NGOs have objectives that are easy to measure and most employees perform a well defined set of tasks. If I'm managing an accounting department, there are deadlines to be met, bills to be sent, payments to be made, reports to be filed and rules to be followed. There are many objective standards by which one can judge an employees performance and a departments performance. If a manager fires too many productive employees over the ones who incompetent but are "hot babes" (for example), the department won't perform well and the managers job is at risk.
Things don't work that way in schools. There aren't clear objective ways to determine whether a Principal's school is providing a top notch education. A Principal who fires the extraordinary teacher that just pissed off a member of the school board is much more likely to be promoted than the Principal that fires the quiet teacher who does little more the baby sit the class. That's what you seem to be missing. The job of Principals and Superintendents isn't to run great schools, its to keep parents, school boards and politicians happy. Sometimes that means running great schools, but often it means kowtowing to the whims politically influential people.
As for how to work out peer reviews, its not half the challenge you imply. Peers don't necessarily have to be from a neighboring district, they just need to be sufficiently removed from the politics of the particular school so that they can provide an objective review. Except perhaps in remote rural areas, most school districts are not far enough from neighboring districts for that to be a significant problem. I checked the maps for the "huge" LA school district and there isn't any place in it that's more than 10 miles from a neighboring district.
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Is it true that businesses are adept at firing the right people? Businesses come and go; have the failed businesses ever been analyzed to determine whether their firing practices contributed to their downfall?
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quote:How long have you been a member of the faculty at a University?
Staff, mostly watching (and hearing, as I had some good sources on multiple sides of some of the best issues) in amusement.
quote:In my experience, some University departments have very nasty internal politics but the further you get removed from the department level, the more objective the committees become.
But we're not talking about high level policy choices (which are mostly made in fact by university administrators who have final authority, not the committees who advise them, coincidentally). We're talking about exactly the sorts of decisions that are made at department level in universities, that lead to the worst sorts of politics.
I've spent over 2 decades as either a staff member or faculty member at 4 different Universities and interacted with far more. I know that departmental politics can be very nasty, but I would choose fuculty governance over strong administration any day of the week. For more reasons than I have time to explain,
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quote:Most business and NGOs have objectives that are easy to measure and most employees perform a well defined set of tasks. If I'm managing an accounting department, there are deadlines to be met, bills to be sent, payments to be made, reports to be filed and rules to be followed. There are many objective standards by which one can judge an employees performance and a departments performance. If a manager fires too many productive employees over the ones who incompetent but are "hot babes" (for example), the department won't perform well and the managers job is at risk.
But you've just listed a similar set of criteria for schools. Except for the managers' job being at risk (which it should be in schools if they fail at such things), you haven't listed a difference.
quote:As for how to work out peer reviews, its not half the challenge you imply. Peers don't necessarily have to be from a neighboring district, they just need to be sufficiently removed from the politics of the particular school so that they can provide an objective review. Except perhaps in remote rural areas, most school districts are not far enough from neighboring districts for that to be a significant problem. I checked the maps for the "huge" LA school district and there isn't any place in it that's more than 10 miles from a neighboring district.
A neighboring district that needs to supply enough people to evaluate tens of thousands of teachers (since we're talking about the Los Angeles district).
What's more, the time burden is the big question. Unlike professors, who have more flexibility in allocating hours (though has lots of duties), almost all of a school teachers' time is devoted to teaching and preparing to teach, and cannot easily be reshuffled. How long are you imagining these evaluations taking for how many teachers, and who will do the teaching while those teachers are busy evaluating?
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