The polarization of public officials and public employees should not come to this. Only an employment system plagued by inequities and neglectful of sound evaluation and promotion practices could bring us to this bitter stand-off. The default of seniority has ruled the evaluation of public employees forever, because it is the simplest and cheapest way to evaluate personnel.
As public service employees are on the firing line for their alleged pension and health excesses, the debate about evaluation and job security of these employees has also been revived. No one disputes that publicly and privately funded employees should enjoy some kind of parity in pay and benefits, but many question whether the public employees are evaluated and promoted under the same principles of merit that exist in the private sector. At least this was the question addressed by Amanda Ripley the current (March 7, 2011) Time Magazine.
Professional employees in the private sector most often depend on the judgments of their supervisors for objective evaluations of their performance. Indeed the requirements for successful administrators often include the thoughtful evaluation of personnel in their departments. A successful corporation depends on reliable and apolitical evaluations of its professional employees.
In most public schools, this duty falls to the principal or assistant principal, who observe their teachers at least once, preferably twice a year. The alleged flaws in this system, are the stringent controls of the tenure system, which protects teachers from unreasonable dismissal. How much this applies to other professions on the public payroll, I cannot say.
But the rub in teacher evaluation often goes back to the skill of the evaluator. When I was a high school English teacher, I always received decent evaluations from my principal, but it was more because he was a former math teacher and felt very insecure about evaluating my discipline. Once, after observing a lesson on poetry for an indifferent group of sophomores, he asked, “Do you really like this stuff?” The ensuing discussion made it clear that he could not see any value in teaching poetry to students who were not college bound.
Clearly my boss did not feel confident and perhaps not competent to judge what an English teacher did. And this is where the rubber hits the road for evaluation of teachers. They should be evaluated not by supervisors who do not understand their discipline, nor by so-called experts viewing a video of their classroom performance. They should not be evaluated by the performance of their students on standardized tests. None of this would be tolerated in the private sector, where performance evaluation is taken seriously.
Teachers should be evaluated by disciplinary specialists who know the context of their teaching and appreciate the skills needed for that context. They should also self-evaluate and make their own case for tenure, as university professors do. Under such conditions we could expect that the best teachers would be retained and the worst removed. Under such conditions, all teachers would earn respectability, both from their profession and from a deserved compensation.
How much this applies to other public employees I would not presume to say, but the requirements of informed evaluators and mutual respect certainly should hold true. What I do understand is that the public sector has never taken employee evaluation as seriously as the privater sector.
If government wants maximum productivity out of its employees, it should be prepared to invest in appropriate systems of evaluation and promotion. This is not a cost-saving proposal, but an efficiency proposal, intended to heal the adversarial relationship that has brought us to impasse in public service.
Public service doesn’t need exorbitant benefits to attract the best and the brightest. It just needs equity and respect.