Last updated on 2014.02.03
Last July I discussed a report that found "stack ranking," a policy very much like the teacher evaluation system in Governor Daugaard's Referred Law 16, "crippled Microsoft's ability innovate."
A blog-friend forwards me another response to that report that supporters of Referred Law 16's stack ranking ought to consider before wrecking their local schools with stack ranking:
To be clear, I am not opposed to pay for performance. But when unnecessary status are created, when small quantitative differences that don't matter are used to decide who is fired, anointed as a star, or treated as mediocre, and when friends are paid to treat each others as enemies, creating the unity of effort required to run an effective organization gets mighty tough -- some organizations find clever ways to get around the downsides of stacking, but some succeed despite rather than because of how they do it.
The late quality guru W. Edwards Deming despised force rankings. Let's give him the last word here. Here is another little excerpt from The Knowing-Doing Gap:
He argued that these systems require leaders to label many people as poor performers even though their work is well within the range of high quality. Deming maintained that when people get these unfair negative evaluations, it can leave them "bitter, crushed, bruised, battered, desolate, despondent, dejected, feeling inferior, some even depressed, unfit for work for weeks after receipt of the rating, unable to comprehend why they are inferior."
[Bob Sutton, "Dysfunctional Internal Competition at Microsoft: We've seen the enemy, and it is us!," Work Matters, July 6, 2012]
Politicians like Governor Daugaard and Senator Russell Olson who think stack ranking is good education policy should not be trusted to make education policy.
It looks as if our Republican leaders in SD are just doing what they are required to do by the Obama administration so that they can secure the waiver needed to get out of the No Child Left Behind program.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-romney-obama-education-20121002,0,2231653.story
"There are policies he can't legally force on states, such as a common curriculum and rules about how they have to evaluate teachers. (He and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are insistent that scores on standardized tests have to be a "significant" part of teacher evaluations; it's not bad policy to include them in some way, but there's a real lack of research to show that they are absolutely key to rating teachers or will improve learning significantly.) So what the administration has done is twist states' arms by making funding via such programs as Race to the Top conditional on meeting its vision of what education should look like, or, more recently, allowing waivers to states from the more onerous and nonsensical elements of the No Child Left Behind Act if they go along."
I do not accept the "Obama made us do it" whipping boy on this issue. First, if it SD Republicans or National Democrats, I am against RL 16 all the same. I don't decide to follow the leader. This state has turned its back on elements of the ACA because they do not like Obama or his rules, but now they "play ball" because told to? No. This is ALEC legislation - that it mirrors elements of NCLB waiver requirements only makes BOTH bad policy.