EVALUATE, EVALUATE

The announcement that lecturers in primary and secondary school will be subject to evaluation including components with origin in the opinion of parents is certainly going to blow a new storm over our education waters.

Let discussion be. No taboos. Beware: keep the principals separated from details of implementation.

Implementation is important, it may curb, condition the application of principles. But the verification of this must be performed only after the principle being accepted in a reasonable way that may make sense.

Unfortunately, there are structures in our society still mighty enough to immediately invoke possible doubts or organization details to render unfeasible the discussion of principles. And the essential discussion to be had is the one placed in the exact terms of an engineering project: evaluate from the results.

The units of our national scientific system have benefited tremendously from the introduction of the principle of the evaluation of their collective performance. INESC Porto has benefited tremendously from the introduction of the principle of the evaluation of its collaborators. No one in sound mind will deny this.

It is therefore sad to witness the retrograde, conservative, reactionary role deployed by some Unions in defense of the indefensible: a system of mock-evaluation, which has been surviving so far in our education system. These attitudes contribute more to the ruin of the country than the raise of the oil price. No taboos: it is a pity to observe the heroic and noble role of union activity turned into grotesque by this corporative stand so harmful to the country.

In this discussion, we can allow no taboos. In engineering, we evaluate performance, that’s how we are used to do and that’s what we are educated for. And we must realize that to the ideological-pedagogical machine that has been the pillar of our primary and secondary school, if subject to evaluation, no maintenance will rescue it from being condemned.

People are not bad or incompetent per se. As a rule, the organizational structures inside which they have to move favor people to be productive or not. This applies to teachers without the shred of a doubt. But rules condition or suggest behavior; and the lack of credible performance evaluation schemes means that there is no closed feed-back loop in the system. As any engineer knows, this means that the system has no control.

Worse, that it is spinning as freewheel and usually unstable and collapsing out of synchronism.

Let the machine be evaluated. If it doesn’t work, or displays perverse behavior, let it be changed. Let the necessary feedback control be introduced. With no taboos.