Bill Gates: Don’t Use Evaluations To Shame

I disagree with Mr. Gates. I think he has made important contributions to the improvement of public education, by sponsoring experimental-research projects across America, ranging from supplying money to inner-city unionized  conventional public schools, to helping non-unionized charter schools, to working on establishing rational teaching-effectiveness metrics.

I would agree with one of his key underlying premises, which he hasn’t fully stated, that it’s not right to humiliate education workers by individual name, in the context that: A) The “system” selected them without proper judging of their abilities to teach 20, 30, even 100-150 other people’s children, 2)  threw millions of young teachers into classes with inadequate preparation, and ongoing monitoring, and 3) failed to provide reasonable corrective guidance.

These caveats admitted, the fact is that many people drawn to the teaching profession, have figured out how to make positive impacts on the lives of other people’s children, despite the forgoing problems, while others have not.  We want to retain the former people, and dismiss the latter.

On Mr. Gates’ points about Microsoft’s not publicly shaming people, he’s making an erroneous comparison.  Lots of people have been drawn to Microsoft to work.  They have been challenged to determine who can do a reasonable job in the capacity in which they are hired, who among MS employees warrants promotion to new areas of responsibility (which is often experimental, as commendable productivity at one level doesn’t necessarily translate into satisfactory productivity at another level), who should be retained doing what they are doing, but not promoted, and who isn’t cutting it at their assigned tasks.  The last are not widely disclosed in the corporation mplyeeship, and certainly not to the public press.

But public school teaching is fundamentally different.  If MS as a private corporate entity produced “crap”, then customers could choose other vendors.  Even if it produced  good stuff, which it did, but not always the best, for many people’s needs, these people could, and often did, choose alternatives.   

If local public schools produced “crap”, there was no alternative choice for parents and their kids.  If we had wide-open private-school-payment-voucher programs and charter school options, it would be good for kids, but millions of kids don’t have either of these options.

Importantly, Mr. Gates’ comparison of MS’s confidential employee evaluations to public education’s previously (and still mostly) concealed-from-the-public teachers’ evaluations–which Mr. Gates tells us has been completely inadequat-is arguably wrong because public school teachers work in a taxpayer-funded public enterprise.  Those who have chosen to work in taxpayer-funded public schools, have not been forced to choose this vocation.  They voluntarily have done so, and they should be given incentives to leave, if they aren’t good at this job, instead of being retained, in the face of doing a “crappy” job.

Mr. Gates is fundamentally saying, “Principals should do a better job in evaluating teachers, but their findings should be confidential.”  The problem with this suggestion is the teachers unions have held such actions to be subject to individual principals’ caprice, which has given public  unions and “teacher protections” that have contributed to the problem of widespread teacher incompetence. (Not the sole cause, i.e. university colleges and schools of education, promulgating ludicrous ideas, recruiting academically-disinclined people to be our K-12 teaching corps, (I was a National Merit Finalist, unadjusted 3.8 GPA, none of my high school’s top 5 mathematics and science students being told, “You should teach HS math and science,) society not accepting the notion of paying the what-it-takes-to-recruit high talent costs of creating a highlytalented teaching corps, society not demanding 230-day school years to prevent students from forgetting what they learned, society letting colleges of education and unions’ excluding high-teaching-ability but non-education-degree people become public school teachers,  and the like, being major contributors to American public education failure. ) 

We see political-office candidates subject to intense media revelations of their public actions, and often private actions as well.  Public service should be subject to intense public inspection. If the kitchen heat is too intense, get out.  If you can survive it, stay in.

If a non-elected public employee is subjected to publication of his or her performance, that’s good.  It’s good for public education for teachers who are holding back other people’s children from being able to achieve their potentials to be publicly identified, and for those teachers who are advancing kids’ abilities to also be identified.

We can argue about NAEP and NCLB-required state tests and grading standards’ utility. It is possible to “teach to the test”, so we need good tests, arguably better than what we have. For example, university-entrance exams in India require expository/essay answers, not easy-to-crib multiple-choice exams.  We also know that some teachers have cheated, in  ”helping” students to get higher scores, to protect their jobs.  They need to be publicly identified, and fired. 

People who choose to teach in public schools must accept responsibility for advancing knowledge and skills acquistion of other people’s children.  These adults demand taxpayers to pay for their services to other people’s children.  If the services to other people’s children are commendable,  they deserve to be employed, and well-remunerated.  If not, well then, they deserve the opportunity to be identified, and helped to find another field of endeavor.   Because if we assume the idea that everyone can find a vocation they are good at, we have to help them find that vocation.  For too many public education teachers, they haven’t found that vocation.