Dr. David Hopson
One of our staff members shared an article on “stacked ranking” with me recently that talked about its use in big business and education. Evidently this is currently a hot topic as I also heard it on the news as I drove to work. Stacked ranking is the process of evaluating employees and then ranking them on their performance with the idea—originally spawned by Jack Welch at GE—that this would lead to an “up or out” decision, i.e., those who were ranked well would be rewarded, those who were on the bottom would be fired.
This “stacked ranking” provided much of the impetus behind the Race to the Top (RTT) program from the U.S. Department of Education with substantial financial support from Bill Gates. In the years since RTT was implemented, many states (including Massachusetts) have modified their evaluation system to mimic the idea of stacked ranking. This includes evaluating education staff on roughly 33 ‘core’ standards, indicators and elements, measuring student growth over time using assessments such as MCAS, and eventually seeking input from students and parents, or teachers and administrators, to determine the ‘effectiveness’ of educational staff.
While no one argues with the necessity of evaluating and supervising teachers and administrators, there has been much discussion on the effectiveness of the assessments used to measure growth, especially MCAS and its replacement, PARRC. Simply put, the majority of these assessments were not designed to measure student growth, or to be determinates of student achievement, but have been ‘adapted’ through statistical manipulation to do so (much like the scores themselves seem to be manipulated from year to year, test to test, and grade to grade). The other interesting item, especially relevant now with the hot issue of unfunded mandates, is the time required by both administrators and teachers to implement this new system, yet no additional funding is provided to complete these evaluations while still completing all of the ever-increasing reports required by both the state and federal governments.
In an interview with Oprah Winfrey, Bill Gates said that adopting a stacked ranking would move American education from last place to first, and that by using the proven processes adopted and implemented from big business we would rapidly improve education. Perhaps the fact that Microsoft (and other corporations) recently dropped their stacked ranking due to significant problems with staff morale, lack of innovation, and the evaluation system suppressing collaborative efforts is the reason this has become news worthy of late. If you review the Massachusetts Model of Evaluation, or the MCAS or PARRC assessments, you’ll quickly note that neither provides any way to measure what we know is important to success in real life – collaboration, problem solving skills, creativity, communication, and ethical behavior (also known as 21st Century Skills). Is it too much to ask that those skills that we know are important to success, whether measured at the family level, work level, community level, or state/federal level, be part of the measurement of student and staff success and evaluation in education? Is this another case of business leaders using their considerable financial resources to foist a solution upon education that, by the time it’s adopted, is no longer being used by business? Or is this another way to divert responsibility from those in charge of creating laws and regulations to deal with issues like education, poverty, and the economy (as well as from individual families) to the schools? We all know that schools only have children approximately 10 percent of the time from birth to age 18, that schools do not control the financial well being of families, and that the best predictor of success on the current standardized tests for students is zip code (social/economic status), yet we are led to believe that spending more time on testing, more time on evaluating students and staff, and additional data collection is more worthwhile than time spent on educating students in a collaborative, problem solving, and authentic learning community. Perhaps this latest news on “stacked ranking” will finally be the extra impetus to the swelling condemnation of the process that will start the pendulum swinging back towards a more realistic, successful, and productive manner of assessing “success” in education.
