Tuesday, January 13, 2015

Time for teacher ranking.

What if we ranked teachers? We are no longer ranking schools; pretty soon we will stop highlighting the best candidates at national examinations. So what if we started to rank the best and the worst teachers? Wilson Sossion and his brethren in the teachers' unions will shit bricks if this idea ever gains currency, but it is one that I believe needs exploring.

When performance contracting was mooted for the public service, it was resisted and sabotaged at every step. But today it is an important indicator of the performers and non-performance of the public service. In the private sector, successful managers are rewarded while unsuccessful ones are encouraged to find gainful work in areas that do not require their particular skill sets. Performance can be measured; all that is needed are the parameters of that measurement. Teachers can hold back the coming performance evaluation only for so long.

The unions' claim is that teachers deserve the increases in their allowances. They deserve these raises in their allowances because without the raises, they will not be motivated to perform at optimum levels. Their demotivation is reflected in the falling standards of the public school sector. If that be the case, therefore, and they indeed get the raises they are demanding, then it is well within our rights to demand an accounting of the increased motivation that the raises will engender.

Standardisation of public services is the order of the day, the flavour of the month. It is what governments do in order to reduce costs, increase efficiency and positively impact the lives of the people. We have already gone a long way down the road to standardisation in basic education in Kenya; curricula and syllabi are mandated by the Ministry of Education and its specialised agenies. School books are approved by these same institutions. teacher training is overseen by the government. What little difference existing between individual teachers is harmonised over the course of their careers. Therefore, it is not impossible to measure the performance of each teacher.

Well-performing teachers will be identified; poorly performing ones will receive the help they require; the government and the teachers' commission will better deploy teachers and teaching resources to ensure equity in the education of our children. That is the theory, at least. Potential risks abound, of course. this is Kenya, after all, where a good idea has never been bereft of saboteurs or incompetent managers.

The unions will never go for it; their fear will be that the ranking of teachers will be used as a basis for dismissing teachers rather than improving teacher quality and, therefor, teacher performance. The teachers will not go for it either. They have done the same thing the same way for thirty years and they will be damned if some whippersnapper "who doesn't understand he facts" attempts to change a system in which they have found great intellectual comfort. The Ministry and its agencies will resists it because, well, that is what the government does to ideas that it has not proposed or promoted. Parents will resist it because they distrust anything that will distract their candidate-children from scoring an A in the national exams.

If it was not for performance appraisal in the public service, I doubt very much that Huduma Centres would be spreading around the country and gaining popularity among the people. Change is scary. Change is disruptive. But after three decades of the same style of managing the education sector, isn't it time for radical ideas to be attempted, if only to guarantee that in the ensuing debate, other good, better ideas are proposed for the sake of making our education sector the envy of the world, our teachers the most motivated and talented, and our people the best-educated?

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