Normally I would consider letting a YouTube clip speak for itself lazy but this one from the Young Turks, who I'm into at the moment, lays it out beautifully.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlOfZL_J5fo

I know which system I would rather have been taught under and which one I would rather for my kids.

What staggered me about the article (just a little; it was written by an academic after all) was that anyone in the twentyfirst century still gives a flying fig what Jack Welch said back in the boom years of the 1980s and 90s.

>>Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric, in his book Straight from the Gut, stated that a major key to his success was to ensure that everyone in his organisation was measured on some objective performance indicator and each year replace the bottom ten per cent.<<

The internal fallacy of this is obvious. While it might be seen as tough and manly to fire ten percent of your staff, it is no guarantee of overall performance improvement. For a start, you need to replace that ten percent with higher performers. What are the chances that a newbie is going to be more productive, in their first year, than the folk they replace? And the mechanics behind replacing 30,000 people a year, together with the appraisal systems that led to the firing in the first place, could only be, in themselves, detrimental.

But even more than that, the entire Welch tenure was fuelled by retrenchment and divestiture. Entire businesses were raped for their core value, then onsold. To use this as an example in the area of education is to miss the point of both asset stripping and performance measurement.

The uncritical acceptance of twentieth-century business ideology in the conduct of a university is a major part of the problem, and features nowhere as part of the solution.

A fundamental management principal is that if you are not measuring something then you don't really care about the outcome.

I have heard all the self righteous squealing from the teacher’s union about not being able to effectively and objectively evaluate teachers given all the variability of student capabilities etc.etc. It is all hog wash.

If you know the business you are in, who your customers are and the process needed to delight your customers then you have the fundamentals for an effective evaluation scheme. I have been in the business world for over 40 years and have always had Key Performance Indicators for myself and those that worked for me. By setting these goals at the beginning of the year ( including how they will be measured) the employee knows exactly what needs to be done and how it will be evaluated at the end of the measurement term.

This is a very effective management tool to be used to identify your star performers (and justify their higher than normal bonus) and to ease out of the business those that can’t cut it. And there frequently are 5 – 10% that are collecting a salary that they are not earning and thus slowing down the others that must take up the slack.

I have managed high tech sales people, piece work employees, scientists and engineers and this process works well. It all comes down to knowing who your customers are and what they want and the process required to deliver the requirements and delight the customer.

In our Aus education system management I don’t think any of these basic tenets are known.

Bruce, teachers work with children and, like actors working with animals and children, "A" does not necessarily lead to "B". By applying your business model for making widgets to the educational setting people will pay for this fact that it was not your intention should do so.

However, a positive outcome would be that teaching methodologies and attention to aspects of curricula that do not enhance measured results in areas needed, yet are handed down by educrats for adherence, would be rejected by teachers. They would be left feeling damned if they did and damned if they didn't follow orders. Promotion in education is based on following the party line set by educrats, not achieving results ("action research" is the term applied to testing new methodologies, with no real measurable results comparison against older ones to justify them, only anecdotal evidence that causes educrats' minds fly to unsubstantiated conclusions when they are in rooms together)

What seems to be what some posters expect of teachers is that they be subversive to ensure the good education of children at the cost of their career advancement/employment. How would they feel about this applying in other workplaces, say in banking, air traffic control or the military?