David,
You ask, regarding ranking and appraisal, if schools should be about
educating all children, or about sorting and selecting for society. This
is an excellent question.
Six years ago I took a sabbatical from my employment to work at the Dept
of Education in Maine on a grant for educational reform of math and
science. My job was to pull together a very divergent group of
constituents into a coherent whole. We developed a broad-based plan based
on the notion that all kids can and will learn. New expectations, new
tools, new approaches, new processes. Actually, most was not new, but was
integrated perhaps more effectively. We had a 5 year grant for a
non-profit corporation, independent of the Dept of Ed, but sharing the
same space. Independent of political pressures, but closely aligned with
the policy-making bodies. I was the vice-chair of the executive
committee, and chair of the strategic planning and assessment committee.
So I was pretty actively involved. The grant ended last year. The
non-profit is continues to exist as a free-standing corporation,
independently financed, still housed within the Dept of Ed. They have a
terrific rapport with the bureaucracy, but remain independent, focused
_exclusively_ on what makes sense for the kids.
There was a lot of individual kid assessment, teacher assessment,
educational programs for teachers, extra-dimensional opportunities for
kids who wanted, school assessment, process assessment, and so forth. Not
nearly as much as we would have liked.
Maine is lucky in some ways. We have an American Indian population, and a
French-Canadian population which is frequently socio-economically
deprived. But we do not have the problems of inner cities. In that sense,
this is not reflective of The United States as a whole. However, our
experience was indicative. Over the period of the grant, women's scores
on our Maine Educatinal Assessment test closed -- no, eliminated -- the
gap with Men's scores. Both on Science and on Math, the gap in scores was
eliminated. All the schools that participated showed gains. All the
grades showed gains. Maine did well on the TIMSS tests, and on national
tests. Actually, Maine was the best and second best in some grade levels.
This is not a fair example, as I said, because we do not have the problems
experienced elsewhere. On the other hand, we do have a rural and poor
population, so one could argue that we just have different problems.
For teachers we provided a lot of small group education about methods,
materials, pitfalls (eg male-female stereotypes), mentors for novice
teachers, 'best practices' coaches for veteran teachers.
For kids there were no gifted and talented programs and no programs for
the slow. There were additional opportunities available (summer
education) for those who sought it out. These were somewhat limited.
This effort was not about low expectations, but about high expectations.
Nor was it about sorting and selecting, only about education. On the
other hand, neither was it short on assessment. Virtually everything we
did, we attempted to assess and understand in terms of what it delivered
to the educational experience of the kids. As you can guess, some of it
was extremely difficult to assess, and we never came to a good resolution.
This effort could go on for another 25 years, and we would still only be
scratching the surface. The purpose of the assessment was, as it is in
business, to understand how to improve. Our over-riding goal was to have
each working group conduct its own assessments, and we provided standards,
expertise, and some guidance. We reported to the executive committee on
where we observed apparent opportunities. No one ever viewed this
assessment process as anything except helpful.
As Steve E would say, there are undoubtedly negatives in the educational
assessment we did. But, did we achieve our goals? Were we proud of
ourselves? Were we proud of the kids? I don't know anyone who
participated who would change it.
Therefore, I would argue that employee assessment is about high
expectations, the expectation that everyone can, and will, perform. It is
actually not about sorting and selecting so much as it is understanding
what is not working so we can all do a better job the next time. My
personal view is that if someone is failing, then a manager is failing
too. If a kid is failing, then a teacher or administrator, or the
materials, or the method, is failing, too. One cannot solve these
failures through intuition or witchcraft. One has to engage the mind,
think about the possible points of failure, then develop experiments to
test hypotheses.
--Rol Fessenden
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