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Measuring Teacher Performance

A recent report that the Los Angeles public schools will start publishing test scores by individual teachers has touched of a storm of protest. The so-called value-added gauges are intended to provide data on how well teachers improve the test scores of their students over the course of a school year.

An academic report by the Economic Policy Institute argues that “the nonrandom assignment of students to classrooms and schools—and the wide variation in students’ experiences at home and at school—mean that teachers cannot be accurately judged against one another by their students’ test scores, even when efforts are made to control for student characteristics in statistical models.”

Although that makes a lot of sense, I understand where the push for value-added gauges comes from. As a parent, I’ve never felt that the effectiveness of my children’s teachers has been evaluated in any meaningful way. Average and incompetent teachers return, year after year, to inflict their ineptness on their students. Lacking any reportable measures of competence, they are unaccountable for their performance except as part of an aggregate school’s overall performance. Teachers need to be accountable for the quality of their work, but measuring that quality has been elusive.

The EPI report offers alternatives that rely less on test scores such as “systematic observation protocols with well-developed, research-based criteria to examine teaching,” but, as the report observes, “American public schools generally do a poor job of systematically developing and evaluating teachers.” And this is only getting worse as shrinking budgets cut funds needed for…

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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Kano Satisfaction Model

A few years ago, I met Noriaki Kano at a hotel restaurant in St. Paul to talk about his famous satisfaction model that helped earn him a Deming Prize and ASQ Medals of Distinction. A retired professor, Kano still spoke about the evolution of his model with intensity and curiosity.

The point of the Kano Satisfaction Model is that organizations need a profound understanding of their customers’ requirements to increase satisfaction and secure loyalty. Not all customer requirements are equal. The Baldrige Criteria ask: “How do you use customer, market, and product offering information to identify and anticipate key customer requirements and changing expectations and their relative importance to customers’ purchasing or relationship decisions?”According to Kano, “relative importance” can be characterized as basic, performance, and excitement.

Basic services or features do little to improve satisfaction unless they fail, in which case they can cause serious dissatisfaction. We expect the checkout lane in a store to move relatively quickly and without any problems. When it does, we don’t feel more satisfied with the store because that is what we expected. When it doesn’t, we feel frustrated and dissatisfied.

Performance services or features are those that produce customer satisfaction. If the store you are visiting is Wal-Mart and you get excited about paying the lowest prices, the signage showing great deals is a differentiable service. If you are shopping at Target, the wide and welcoming aisles and the quality of the merchandise may be differentiable services. Wal-Mart, Target, and other stores must be clear about…

(3 votes, average: 4.33 out of 5)

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How to Be the Best

Baldrige.com focuses on information that can help you build the organization you want. As a result, nearly all of the articles address elements that contribute to an excellent management system. This one is different: It looks at how you can become excellent at your heart’s desire.

In “Six Keys to Being Excellent at Anything” (HBR, August 24, 2010), Tony Schwartz quickly dismisses the myth that greatness is determined by our genetic inheritance. He analyzes current thinking about building personal capacity as well as his company’s experience working with executives to state that how hard we are willing to work determines our level of excellence. The minimum level of practice required to be expert in something, according to people who have studied this, seems to be 10,000 hours. That’s about seven years of practice at 4.5 hours per day, six days a week (this will make more sense when you read Tony’s list).

Schwartz offers six keys to achieving excellence:

1. Pursue what you love. Passion “fuels focus, resilience, and perseverance.”
2. Do the hardest work first. Great performers delay gratification and do the most difficult first.
3. Practice intensely – for 90 minutes without interruption. Then take a break. And great performers practice no more than 4.5 hours a day.
4. Seek expert feedback in intermittent doses. The feedback should be simple and precise.
5. Take regular renewal breaks. Relaxing allows time to rejuvenate, metabolize, and embed learning.
6. Ritualize practice. Build specific, inviolable times to practice. As Schwartz notes, “will and discipline are wildly overrated.”

I know a very successful leader who could have written…

(5 votes, average: 4.20 out of 5)

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