Dear Reader:My July newsletter elicited a strong reaction from scores of readers. Many trapped in the dungeon of corporate America and have to suffer performance appraisals, ranking and incentives.
One reader shared with me about a large reform effort in the US that is happening today. It is happening in education and on a large scale. The "reformations" are about evaluating teachers based on student test scores. This is doing the wrong thing, righter.
We have already seen the cheating going on in schools to get the test scores up, especially in
Dallas, Atlanta and DC. Cheating is a predictable reaction to trying to survive in poorly designed systems, such as the US education system.
Clueless executives bring such thinking into education systems because it "worked" in corporate America. Let us not get evidence in the way of a good ideology . . . based in assumption of course.
Thinking like this will turn the clock back on education as it has for corporate America. In the US, appraisals and rankings are used to divvy out wage increases and incentives. The result - the banking industry is filled with Ponzi schemes, London Whales and risking other peoples money leading to the worse recession in the history of the US. Is this really the American way?
Education too?
Some people are calling for reforms that mean greater compliance and oversight, others for greater ethics. The first is expensive as education "reformers" have to provide oversight for cheating and some has to rank all these people - this is waste. In banking, the same applies compliance and oversight is expensive. The problem is the incentives, bonuses, appraisals and ranking by creating artificial scarcity where none exists.
We can design better systems in organizations that designs these elements out. The purpose of education IMHO is to make life-long learners out of students. Ranking and test scores create winners and losers and the losers are the students and the US system in general.
More reading on education:
Other posts:
You may also wish to request "The Case Against Deliverology" as some of the "new" thinking is based on this assumption.
