EVALUATION
2.4.3 ACCOUNTABILITY VERSUS PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT A contentious issue that has attracted much debate is whether performance management
of teachers should be concerned with teacher development or is its chief concern the promotion of accountability. There is a strong belief that developing staff improves organizational effectiveness and individual performance and provides people with opportunities to develop competencies required to fulfill their current responsibilities. It involves performance review, career counseling, mentoring and providing feedback and is seen as fostering the skills and knowledge of people. Building capacity, the
development of people, the empowerment of people, encouraging feelings of self-
efficacy, motivation and initiative are very important in performance management. Styan (1988) argues further that the appraisal process must be kept separate from matters designed to address competence, grievance and discipline. Teacher and school evaluation should enhance performance, celebrate what is good and excellent and develop skills where required. Middlewood and Cardno (2001) present the other spectrum of
development appraisal. They see it as a ‘soft’ form of appraisal which achieves little and lacks public credibility.
Principals and governing bodies have expectations that the teacher is able to provide teaching for effective learning. Beyond the school, Educational Departments have a more general responsibility to see that the taxpayer’s money is well spent on the best teaching staff possible. From the demand for accountability, it follows that procedures need to be put in to place to ensure these demands are met.
At national level, this may consist of policies being introduced with an emphasis on particular outcomes which the teacher and school need to demonstrate. Behaviours are prescribed and performance must be monitored using key performance indicators. To be met, these objectives must be clearly specifiable, objectively measurable and easily evaluated. This would require designated staff, (managers) to make such observances and check such lists as are required of them to make recommendations about a teacher’s performance. It may also entail scoring and tallying of scores. This means that
performance management must be ‘empirically based, strictly applied, tightly
administered and publicly transparent’ (Clark et al 2000). Needless to say, this approach to both performance and quality management is patently rationalist and positivist in orientation.
Clark et al (2000: 71) have argued that the concept of teacher performance upon which the management of teachers is based is deeply flawed and the whole approach should be rejected, its management included. This reasoning is based on the fact that it is
ethically troubling that social context and the nature of the task is not considered and that a single model of management is applied to all school activity. Using CMS
principles, the following objections against managerialist quality management systems in education can be raised:
• The behaviour specified in objectives against which it is judged cannot measure the full range and depth of teaching abilities possessed by teachers.
• The complex, abstract and conceptual thought that shapes a teacher’s professional practice may never be observed behaviourally nor inferred from behaviour yet is constitutive of all a teacher engages in professionally,
• Teaching is also a moral and political and educational activity
• The system is imposed on teachers and teachers are not given autonomy to take professional responsibility for their conduct resulting in a deprofessionalisation of the teaching profession.
It must be remembered that demands for a tighter system of accountability often come from some bureaucratic central authority rather than teachers themselves, therefore it can be viewed as an imposition on teachers. In short it will serve the interests of government ministers rather than the professional interests of teachers who want to address the educational needs of their learners. This study advocates two ways of managing teacher performance using the principles of CMS. The first way would be to accept what has been laid down and try to apply it in an ethically acceptable way to foster professional development and professional growth and improvement. The
second way would be to call the model for managing performance into question and to replace it with a more ethically acceptable framework for enhancing teacher’s teaching and learner’s learning. In other words, is the managerial model acceptable on ethical grounds and if it is not acceptable then it ought to be replaced by one built on educational ideal. An ethical model of managing performance will recognize that teaching is a public good as well as a moral and educational activity.
One can argue that what constituted an education ideal is also subject to debate as is the notion of school quality. Therefore this study proposes that the performance management system be a combination of accountability and teacher professional development.. Fiddler (1998) reiterates this position stating that ‘performance management should combine reviewing of the past year’s work (evaluation) with the planning, training and setting targets for the coming year (development)’ (Fiddler and Cooper 1998). However, there is no scheme of teacher evaluation whether a purely developmental one, an accountability focused one or a mixed one that does not effect professional growth. Therefore, the author of this thesis argues that professional
development should be the ultimate purpose of teacher evaluation. Zhang (2005) states:
The purpose of evaluation is not to prove but to improve (23).
A further suggestion to policy makers and implementers has to be made. It is very easy to be swayed towards accountability in a quality management system proposing
development. In the design of a performance management system it is important to be
clear about the extent to which such a scheme would be evaluative and the extent to which it would developmental. Francis Fukuyane (2004) reminds us of the key
differences between the private and the public sector with regard to monitoring employee performance:
Monitoring agent behaviour and holding agents accountable is particularly difficult in the public sector. Public sector organizations produce
primarily services, and service sector productivity is inherently hard to measure. The problem of monitoring and accountability is bad enough in private sector organizations, where there are at least profitability
benchmarks for measuring outputs, but it becomes virtually impossible to solve for many types of public sector outputs. If the latter cannot be measured accurately, there can ultimately be no formal mechanism for delivering transparency and accountability (75).