Parents: The Difference between Microsoft and Schools

Posted: 14 Mar 2012 12:39 PM PDT

By Jeffrey Puryear

PREAL Co-director

Images are from here and here.

I wonder whether Bill Gates, in his recent op-edarguing against making public the results of teachers' individual performanceassessments (as New York City has begun to do), leaves out an important point.

Gates believes that making individual teacher scores publicamounts to shaming those with low scores, and to no good end. He compares doingso with practice at Microsoft, where employee evaluations are only shared withmanagers, to "help employees reflect on their performance, get honestfeedback and create a plan for improvement." Wendy Kopp,founder and CEO of Teach for America, similarly argued in her March 7 articlethat teacher evaluations should only be viewed and used by administrators.

Butisn't Microsoft different in important ways from public school systems? Microsoft's customers can choose to buyMicrosoft products or to buy from some other company. They can judge theproducts on their own merits (which are widely publicized), so don't needinformation about the staff that produce them. By contrast, most parents whosend their children to public schools (and particularly poor parents) cannotchoose to go elsewhere. They must take the teachers their neighborhood schooloffers, and they have little information on their merits. Once they realize theimpact a particular teacher has on their children, serious harm may have beendone.

It's hard to argue that public schools are like Microsoft. WhatGates leaves out are parents, whose interests are directly tied to teacherquality. Rich families address the teacher quality problem by sending theirchildren to expensive private schools, or to public schools in upscaleneighborhoods, where teachers are likely to be recruited more carefully andsupervised more effectively. Poor parents have only teacher assessments to goon. So while Gates might be right about not making individual teacher assessmentsavailable to the general public (although I'm unconvinced), he fails torecognize that parents have a right to know how good their children's teachersare.