Rank and Yank REACH

Stack this!

Microsoft made big news today when it abandoned its controversial, largely destructive employee ranking system called stack ranking where employees are pitted against each other to earn gold stars from their bosses. Sounds an awful lot like CPS's REACH. 

Stack ranking, or rank and yank, requires managers to rate employees against each other and assign a numerical rating.  These ratings usually follow a bell curve: 20% receive the highest rating, 70% receive a good rating, and 10% are rated lowest and shown the door. Critics argue this system is unfairly rigid, so we can see how it sounds like the ideal strategy to account for a dynamic, ever-changing school system!

Among the negative attributes of stack ranking are:

• Employees unwilling to work with each other for fear of others receiving a higher rating.

• Employees openly sabotaging co-workers so they maintain a top rating.

• Short-term individual focus of getting the highest ranking versus a long-term focus of working toward a common goal.

As formal observations begin, we can already imagine the pitfalls of REACH:

• Teachers who are unwilling to collaborate for fear their colleagues will get a better rating.

• Teachers who begin volunteering for everything to score brownie points with the admin.

• Teachers who are increasingly paranoid about the constant surveilling of their teaching practices, grades, room appearance, and attitude.

• Teachers who no longer share a once-common goal of advocating for and helping students improve, but instead feel they must advocate for themselves first.

If schools can no longer follow the outdated model of "helping teachers teach" and must pick a corporation to follow, then they should at least follow Google's lead (and high stock price! Cha-ching!!) and encourage teachers to take time to pursue what they're interested in. However, this approach assumes that teachers are people whose thinking is valued, not just parts of the corporate education machine rolling over everything in its path all the while helping profiteers add to their bottom line.

Readers: has REACH changed your school? For our parent readers out there, have you noticed any change in teaching, good or bad? Click anonymous in the comment section and let us know!

REACHin' For Excellence

The REACH Evaluation

In Sunday's CPS issued Teacher Newsletter, we're treated to this sage advice about teaching:

Having spent the last few columns talking about setting high expectations and communicating them to students, scaffolding students to share their thinking, and engaging students in rigorous texts and tasks, it follows naturally that we should next spend time examining just what students actually learned! Component 3d [in REACH] gets at just that: where are students on their path to learning?

Ah yes, our old friends high expectations and rigor. It seems we can't go a day without hearing about high expectations and rigor! We are unsure about how scaffolding students to share thinking is done. But no matter, this is all tied to the new amped-up, excellence-inducing REACH Performance evaluation, of which one goal is to:

• Establish a common definition and standards for teaching excellence. Yes, because all you need is excellence.

How is this done?

• Standardized tests! Here, this means "customized performance tasks...which assess student mastery of standards."

If only this applied to the test developers. A reader email tipped us off to what some schools' faculties received via email today:

"...some departments had issues with test fairness and accuracy of the task. A passage may have had inaccurate information in it, the answer key may have been inaccurate and/or incomplete, or the student document never specified how many examples a student had to provide to receive credit."

Inaccurate information? Incomplete answer keys? Unspecified requirements? Teachers' job security is based on possibly inaccurate tests that will measure (or not) what a student learns during the year? Sounds like excellence to us!

Teachers, have you noticed inaccurate REACH exams?