The recent mass firing of an entire high school staff in Central Falls, RI is remarkable on several levels. And one of these is that there were many teachers fired who had not only a history of loyalty to the school and community but had years’ worth of positive evaluations or performance reviews.
No one can argue that an organization, whether a school or business, should have a fair and effective means of determining whether employees are working to capacity and serving as a valued resource. A solid employee appraisal process gives management an opportunity to present positive feedback and to point out ways in which employee performance may need strengthening.
It is a time when organizational and worker goals can be reviewed and aligned, and if relevant, obstacles to optimal performance can be identified and remediated. Through continuous refinement, the performance review process can add potency to organizational operations.
But what happens when performance reviews are just an empty meaningless management tactic that really holds no operational value or legitimacy? That appears to have been the case in Central Falls.
I had an opportunity lately to speak with some of the current and soon to be former staff of Central Falls High School and as would be expected they were disgruntled with what occurred. But the one single complaint that was heard most often was the one concerning the apparent lack of weight given to performance reviews. How can it be, they rightly ask, that teachers who had proven their merit through a negotiated performance review process did not have that process factor into their dismissal decision? All the effort placed by administrators into evaluating staff was wasted, since their assessment work had no bearing when it came to a mass firing.
So why did the school district bother with performance reviews? One of the reasons why they occur is to identify employee training needs. Given that this school had a history of low-functioning students from low-income homes, it seems reasonable to assume that staff training needed to be better concentrated on improving student achievement with a challenging population such as this one.
One wonders to what extent this training happened. Is it reasonable to assume that all the teachers were so incompetent that they were incapable of addressing the serious educational needs of an admittedly difficult student body? I think it was easier to just fire everybody, rather than to try building an effective training program.
Another important function of performance reviews is to diagnose weaknesses to better address organizational inefficiencies. When an organization deteriorates to the point that its shortcomings are overwhelming, the question arises as to whether the blame lies more with the workforce or the leadership.
It is difficult to see how this school was well administered. Education is difficult, but it is not particle physics. A more strategic attempt to use performance reviews as part of a plan to better target and mitigate organizational imperfections could have been a more humane and intelligent approach to strengthen the school.
Perhaps the most important reason for having performance reviews is that they provide opportunities for employees and management to have frank and solution-oriented discussions of workplace issues. People do not go into teaching for money and prestige, but to try making a difference in their communities and to the lives of youth. It is one of those jobs that combines art, science, and passion to produce competence and effectiveness… not unlike many jobs out there.
Members of an organization need to be able to collaborate forcefully on making quality decisions and solving problems. Institutionalizing improvement measures internally is paramount for an organization in crisis.
Can you imagine the lack of cooperation and trust between management and rank and file that results in the firing of every employee? This is a case study of organizational failure.
