Performance Evaluation Systems

Performance evaluation systems are managerial tools designed to facilitate an organization in accomplishing certain strategic goals in the human resource area. Within the public school setting, performance appraisal systems encompass and expand traditional employee assessment tasks through a systematic plan of execution design to accomplish specific goals. Underlying the emergence and adoption of performance appraisal systems by public school districts are certain societal events.

Most notably among these societal events is the recent focus on accountability with respect to academic performance of students as measured by state proficiency tests. In the past, formal accountability measures were almost nonexistent relative to student performance. Today, accountability measures of student performance are disaggregated according to school districts, building levels, as well as classroom settings, and this information is reported in the popular press and on the World Wide Web.

Accompanying the accountability movement and influencing the adoptions of performance evaluation systems on the part of school districts is the emergence and saturation of employee unions within the public school setting. Employee appraisal, once an exclusive managerial task, has become a bilateral concern involving unions as well as school administrators. To accommodate the concerns of both parties, performance evaluation systems are more viable than the traditional appraisal process used by most public school districts in the past.

Indeed, in the past, employee appraisals were viewed as an event as opposed to a performance evaluation process. As an event, performance appraisals were conducted on a particular day, based on a single job [Page 742]observation, void of defined goals, and lacked any formal follow-up in most instances. As a result, an employee could fair well or not so well depending on the day chosen for the appraisal.

In contrast to the traditional methods of performance appraisal, performance evaluation systems fill many voids. Structurally, performance evaluation systems impose a formal structure for the employee evaluation process involving input from administrators as well as employees. At minimum, this structure of performance evaluation systems involves a preassessment conference, an on-job observation(s), as well as an assessment of appropriate information, and a postconference debriefing.

Goals of the preassessment conference are to outline organizational expectations relative to purpose, to describe the manner in which the evaluation process will be conducted, to present the employee with appraisal instruments, and to discuss employee concerns. Each of these topics is a necessary part of an effective performance evaluation system, and each deserves further consideration. For example, with respect to the purpose of the appraisal, as fundamental as this may seem, the purpose is often overlooked or unknown by the participants.

The purpose of a performance evaluation system can vary in some important ways, and these ways of variation are often mutually exclusive. Purposes of a performance evaluation system could be to assess if a particular employee should be retained by a school district, to determine among employees those most entitled to awards, merit increases, promotions, or special training, or to identify particular skill enhancement areas for making individuals better employees. Based on these separate purposes that a performance evaluation system can fulfill, different referent standards are utilized by effective performance evaluation systems.

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