{"id":19638,"date":"2013-07-26T12:00:04","date_gmt":"2013-07-26T16:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/?p=19638"},"modified":"2013-07-30T11:38:19","modified_gmt":"2013-07-30T15:38:19","slug":"classroom-contemplations-what-silicon-valley-tells-us-about-evaluating-performance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/2013\/07\/26\/classroom-contemplations-what-silicon-valley-tells-us-about-evaluating-performance\/","title":{"rendered":"Classroom Contemplations: What Silicon Valley Tells Us About Evaluating Performance"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Yahoo!<\/a>

Beck Diefenbach \/ Reuters\/Landov<\/p>

Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer.<\/p><\/div>\n

Editor’s note: Names of teachers and students have been changed.<\/em><\/p>\n

Are search engines really more complicated than children?<\/p>\n

That question occurred to me last week when the annual earnings report for Yahoo! came out and it became clear that CEOs are cut a lot more slack than teachers are.<\/p>\n

New Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer was hired with much fanfare last year and tasked with turning the company around (or at least bringing it out of the doldrums in relation to its competitors). \u00a0She just finished her first year so I expected these revenue numbers were going to tell us whether she was doing a good job or not<\/p>\n

It turns out that Yahoo! revenue was down — 7 percent as compared to the same point the year before. \u00a0If advertising commissions were taken out of the revenue numbers, it was a 1 percent decline.<\/p>\n

And revenue in the private sector is the bottom line, right? \u00a0So I guess Marissa Mayer was a failure.<\/p>\n

Not according to Yahoo! \u00a0Mayer wasn\u2019t fired. \u00a0Her salary wasn\u2019t cut. \u00a0In fact, it was supplemented.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In addition to her half-million dollar salary, she received $1.1 million in cash, and $4.3 million in stock. \u00a0(Even if my students\u2019 test scores go through the roof, it would take me more than a century teaching to earn what she\u2019ll get for her first year\u2019s performance.)<\/p>\n

And Yahoo! isn\u2019t alone in their positive views of Mayer. \u00a0Most stories I saw about Mayer actually saw her first year as a success.<\/p>\n

They seemed to recognize that evaluating her performance was a lot more complicated than one simple revenue number. \u00a0Many business analysts celebrated her anniversary and brought up the fact that Yahoo! is showing signs of improvement that may take a few years to take hold. \u00a0They pointed to many of the company\u2019s acquisitions and other strategy changes that they believe will pay long-term dividends for Yahoo!<\/p>\n

On one hand, I was delighted. \u00a0These stories were making the exact same point I\u2019ve been trying to make through this entire Classroom Contemplations series about the value of teachers.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been trying to show, through the stories of Ms. Williams, Mr. Bernard, Madame Logan, and their peers that the value of teachers is usually a lot more complicated than a simple number and often can\u2019t be measured in a single year.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, I was even more frustrated, because all the nuance brought to bear in Mayer\u2019s evaluation is completely ignored in our education policy. If Ms. Mayer was a teacher in Florida and Yahoo!\u2019s revenue was treated like student test scores, her salary would have gone down and she would have been labeled an inadequate teacher.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s why I started to wonder if search engines are just inherently more complex than children. \u00a0Could that be? \u00a0Or maybe they\u2019re just much more important. \u00a0I don\u2019t know what other conclusion to come to.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re willing to recognize that, in regards to search engines, things are complicated. \u00a0We\u2019re not willing to acknowledge the same with our children.<\/p>\n

We all seem to accept that you can\u2019t reduce the value of a CEO to a simple measurement of revenue.<\/p>\n

Why, then, would we do something similar to our teachers?<\/p>\n

What\u2019s particularly galling for me is that many of those who advocate for \u201cvalue added\u201d accountability, particularly in our State Legislature, are the very people who say that we need to learn our lessons from the private sector. \u00a0While I usually reject such rhetoric as meaningless platitude, in this case, I think they are right.<\/p>\n

We should learn the lesson of Marissa Mayer from the private sector. \u00a0We should learn that evaluation is not quick and it isn\u2019t simple. \u00a0If we\u2019re looking to determine someone\u2019s long-term value, we\u2019ll have to look at a lot more than one number over one year.<\/p>\n

Jeremy Glazer is a Miami-Dade teacher writing about classroom issues for StateImpact Florida. Want to sound off on something Glazer has written? Want to suggest a topic for him? Send us an email at Florida@stateimpact.org and put \u201cClassroom Contemplations\u201d in the subject line.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Editor’s note: Names of teachers and students have been changed. Are search engines really more complicated than children? That question occurred to me last week when the annual earnings report for Yahoo! came out and it became clear that CEOs are cut a lot more slack than teachers are. New Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":155,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[16],"tags":[841,1119,1079],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19638"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/155"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19638"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19638\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19659,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19638\/revisions\/19659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}