Rating Teachers

There has been much written in the past few years about the key to increasing student performance in schools is to evaluate teachers against stricter, more quantitative criteria and then rank them--as New York City public schools has done.

While I don't disagree with improving quality in schools (although the rub here is what constitutes added quality) or better supervision and evaluation of teachers (after all, the most important variable in any classroom is the teacher), a recent article in The New Yorker illustrates the inherent subjectivity in evaluating anyone.

In the study referenced, better-looking men and women received greater salary increases than average-looking men and women. (Also, taller people get paid more as well.)

Good news if you're tall and good-looking; less so for everyone else.

A few years ago, I had the pleasure of being in a leadership program at IU, and one of the professors shared his research on the subjectivity of performance evaluations. While most managers/supervisors would assume that the relationship between their employees' actual objective performance, e.g., how many widgets made in a month, and their performance evaluation would directly correlate, the actual correlation is only 5%-10%.

The reason?

Even though managers/supervisors believe they base performance evaluations on objective criteria, they in fact unconsciously base their evaluations on "organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs)."

OCBs are qualities like altruism, courtesy, cheerleading, peacekeeping, sportsmanship, conscientiousness, and civic virtue.

No matter how objective you try to be, you are influenced by subtle and unconscious factors.

As a humanities teacher, I have for over 30 years had to grade student work in poetry, creative writing, art projects, etc. I have always recognized that even though my grades are based on defined criteria, my grading was influenced by the uniqueness of each student. One student needed a boost of confidence, another took a risk on an assignment but fell short in performance, another completed the assignment well but did not push or challenge himself. Consequently, I have often found myself grading student work based more on the individual than on the "objective standards."

Most of us look to objectivity as a fair and impartial way to measure performance--be it in the classroom or the widget factory--yet we must recognize that any performance system will be influenced by outside factors.

Attached is an interesting article from a public school teacher about her decision to move to private school due to teacher ratings: Click