Dr. Stephen Mucher is an assistant professor of history and
education at Bard College. In
this public radio interview, he explains the original
(and still valid!) purpose of teacher evaluation.
Professors visited classrooms not to grade teachers, but to learn about
instruction and how to improve it. It was a mutual endeavor,
intended to help, not to destroy and punish and fire. History has
much to teach us, if only we are willing to learn.
Here is my take, not Mucher’s:
The current era of teacher evaluation can be traced
to the social efficiency movement that began with the work of
Frederick Winslow Taylor. His time-and-motion studies emphasized
the importance of measuring the worker’s output and challenging all
workers to meet the same metric. In the 1920s, efficiency experts
took a leading role in the field of curriculum and instruction. Men
like John Franklin Bobbitt and W.W. Charters devised elaborate
checklists to measure teacher quality. Bobbitt came up with
cost-benefit analyses for subject matter, and he decided that Latin
should be discarded because it cost too much and produced nothing
of value, by his measures.
I wrote about the efficiency movement in
my 2000 book Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School
Reform. The original title was Left Back: A
Century of Failed School Reforms. I hated the title and
I hated the subtitle. The editor at Simon & Schuster, Alice
Mayhew–a legendary figure–insisted that the title had to have the
word “fail” in it. When the book came out in paperback, I was
allowed to change the subtitle to more accurately reflect the
content of the book (forgive the split infinitive).
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thank you to Professor Mucher and to Diane for highlighting the historical reason for having teacher evaluation. Just as in the medical profession the true value of evaluation is in improved practice. The first tenet that should be observed, I believe, is respect for the subject of the evaluation, the teacher. The classroom teacher should have a central role in determining what is evaluated and how feedback is provided. Evaluation must not be a game of “gotcha”, but a genuine effort towards improved practice.
I discuss this theme in my recent blog post here. http://russonreading.blogspot.com/2013/09/valuing-professional-educator-toward.html.
Russ Walsh
There is a Deming Conference yearly. I like Demong’s work and have written about it. After WWIi, Deming went to American Corps. and discussed his ideas. They poo-pooed him…the US corps were making tons of $$$$$ . So Deming took his ideas to Japan. The Japanese industries used his democratic and sensible Ideas and flourished. I remember the days when; MADE IN JAPAN was a joke…not so anymore. Now it’s MADE IN CHINA, we have too avoid. Vote with your money.
Yes. Yes. Yes!
“The current era of teacher evaluation can be traced to the social efficiency movement that began with the work of Frederick Winslow Taylor.” –Diane Ravitch
For more on Taylorism and today’s Neo-Taylorism, look to Kenneth Delavigne and Daniel Robertson’s book, “Deming’s Profound Changes: When Will the Sleeping Giant Awaken.”
This presentation by Dan Robertson offers a perspective…
Click to access Dan%20Robertson%20-%20Profound%20Changes.pdf
Thank you for the interesting reference.
🙂
And the current era 2013 version, can be traced to the moment that plutocratic pirates figured out there was money to be made and democracy to be plundered.
A deliberate, multi-year strategy was put in place. Teacher evaluation was tied to school failure, costly/corporate remediation, drill&kill “curriculum”, assaults on unions, pensions, salary schedules, tenure and the very existence of a Free Public School system. Years later we have a generation of students (and teachers) now incapable of the clear, critical thinking necessary for a free citizenry….also part of the master plan.
Kentucky is piloting a new teacher evaluation system, called PGES (Professional Growth and Effectiveness System) this school year. It’s been in development for the last four years. Already there are superientendents who are asking when they can use it to make personnel decisions .
OH….and there’s work being done in developing something similar for principals and superientendents. Interesting how the teacher piece came before the administrative piece. As shown by Chubb & Moe in their book Politics, Markets & America’s Schools (thank you, Dr. Ravitch, for bringing that book to my attention), “effective” schools are, in large part, determined by leadership.
Great post!
To those who haven’t read Diane Ravitch’s Left Back, treat yourselves! What a fascinating and riveting work. It’s one to which I return again and again.
BTW, there’s a great book yet to be written about what can be learned about teacher quality from the successes and failures of the quality control movement in industry. I point people, in particular, to the following among Demings’s famous “14 Points”:
10.”Eliminate slogans.” It’s not people who make most mistakes –it’s the lousy systems they are working within. Harassing the workforce without improving the processes they use is counter-productive.
11.”Eliminate management by objectives.” Deming saw production targets as encouraging the delivery of poor-quality goods.
12.”Remove barriers to pride of workmanship” and sources of alienation. Many of the other problems outlined reduce worker satisfaction.
13.”Institute education and self-improvement.”
14.”The transformation is everyone’s job.”
Taylor and Deming are just about as far away from one another as any two could be, and a close look at why the former was so wrong and the latter so right would go a long way toward explaining just how and why the current “reform movement” in the US is so disastrous.
In quality control, we have a lot to learn from Japanese industry and, especially, from worker empowerment in Japan. The top-down, totalitarian approach simply doesn’t work. It doesn’t bring about continuous improvement. Something like the sort of line worker empowerment that occurs in Japanese industry and the Lesson Study that occurs in Japanese schools does.
Here’s Bob Shepherd’s summary of the great work of William Edwards Deming:
Quality flows from the bottom up. You already know what flows from the top down.
Indeed we do!
Robert:
This blog takes HTML tags so using will produce italics, and will switch off italics. Replacing the i with a b will produce bold
You can find a list of standard HTML tags via Google.
Let me try that again. Thanks, Bernie!
Robert:
Deming’s philosophy and approach definitely makes sense though I am less clear how it would actually work in schools because the work processes of teachers are largely invisible to their colleagues – though the work outputs might be. I recall the start of the Quality Circle movement in the 1970s. It has been around for long enough surely it was tried in the schools. If so, what actually happened? Is it covered in Diane’s book? (I am about to go and pick it up at the library.)
In reality there is nothing per se wrong with Taylor’s industrial engineering approach. What happened is that in many cases it was implemented in pre-existing authoritarian work environments and was linked to piece work systems and had the potential to require more effort without any concomitant increase in pay. There is nothing in it that requires it to be a top down management process. Indeed you can view Deming’s ideas as putting the tools of scientific management in the hands of employees: The measurement and charting are essentially the same. But effective and meaningful measurements remain at the heart of the process.
Thanks, Bernie. I mentioned Japanese Lesson Study, which is the most thorough-going example that I know about of the application of the quality circles approach to schooling.
http://www.tc.columbia.edu/lessonstudy/lessonstudy.html
“putting the tools of scientific management in the hands of employees”–that’s well said, Bernie
Interesting. I had not seen or heard of this before, though it does sound similar to the process referenced by Pasi Sahlberg in Finnish Lessons.
I’ve had the good fortune, a couple of times, to serve on juries. I say “good fortune” because in both cases it was wonderful to see how very, very seriously and deliberately ordinary people across the socioeconomic spectrum took this high duty entrusted to them.
Thanks, Bernie, for the reference to the book by Sahlberg. I shall give it a read. I was struck by the following passages from the introduction, by Andy Hargreaves, to Sahlberg’s book:
“Professor Yong Zhao, the leading American expert on educational reform in China and Southeast Asia, points out the China, the leading economic competitor of the United States, is actually decentralizing its curriculum, diversifying assessment, and encouraging local autonomy and innovation. Meanwhile, Zhao concludes, while China is decentralizing and Singapore is promoting a creative environment characterized by the principle of “Teach Less, Learn More,” U.S. education has been stubbornly ‘MOVING TOWARD AUTHORITARIANISM, letting the government dictate what and how students should learn and what schools should teach.'”
and this
“Finland, he shows . . .
“–relies on high-quality, well-trained teachers, with strong academic qualifications and master’s degrees, who are drawn to the profession by its compelling societal mission and ITS CONDITIONS OF AUTONOMY AND SUPPORT. . . .
“–has developed teachers’ capacity to be collectively responsible for developing curriculum and diagnostic assessments together RATHER THAN DELIVERING PRESCRIBED CURRICULA AND PREPARING FOR THE STANDARDIZED TESTS DESIGNED BY CENTRAL GOVERNMENTS.”
The caps are mine. There doesn’t seem to be a feature for italicizing for emphasis in these posts.
I tried to explain HTML tags to produce italics but evidently there is no way to show “less than” and “greater than” symbols/brackets
Thanks,<Bernie!
Robert:
Heh, cute. Such rapid feedback. You can add
links as well.
BTW, for others who are interested in learning more about quality control and the powerful techniques involved, I highly recommend, as a starting place, this concise little book:
George, Michael L., et al. The Lean Six Sigma Pocket Toolbook: A Quick Reference Guide to 100 Tools for Improving Quality and Speed. New York: McGraw, 2004.
For those who who want to go deeper, the two standard references are
Defeo, Joseph, and J.M. Juran. Juran’s Quality Handbook: The Complete Guide to Performance Excellence, 6th ed. New York, McGraw, 2010.
and
Pyzdek, Thomas. The Six Sigma Handbook. New York: McGraw, 2003.
Both are superb.
And don’t let the “control” part scare you off. These tools can and should be used in the context of worker empowerment.
Thanks, Bernie!
“Bobbitt came up with
cost-benefit analyses for subject matter, and he decided that Latin
should be discarded because it cost too much and produced nothing
of value, by his measures. ”
I guess Bobbitt did not consider Western Civilization to be something of value, not to mention about 65% of the vocabulary of his own language.
I often find myself in the position of defending my field to the Bobbitts of the world.
I would add that what we see in schools is the adoption honest assessment vernacular in teacher evaluation, but a dishonesty of intention. I, and many teachers I know, have felt slapped in the face by words like “improvement,” and “growth.” They are delivered with an overtone of threat. As in “If we don’t see (insert perfectly reasonable goal here) you will be shamed and then fired. Here in Portland it was rumored (and almost certainly true) that all principals are supposed to have at least one teacher on a plan of assistance- assistance of course being a euphemism for “shaming.”
As Henry David Thoreau said, “What you are is speaking so loud I can’t hear what you are saying.”