Program evaluators foray into personnel evaluation

Abstract

Historically, most program evaluators have not dealt with the evaluation of educational personnel. Stufflebeam and Sanders (1987), in writing about the need for improving personnel evaluations in education, point out that the program evaluation movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s largely excluded concerns for personnel evaluation. Despite historical practice, Stufflebeam and Sanders call upon evaluators to address personnel evaluation issues in addition to evaluations of students and programs. The position advocated by these authors raises the question of how evaluators might become involved in personnel evaluation. The purpose of this article is to describe one role that program evaluators can play: reviewing local personnel evaluation systems and addressing issues related to personnel evaluation. The need for local review of personnel evaluation systems has been documented by Ellett and Garland (1987), who report that policies in nearly 60% of the 100 largest U.S. school districts do not expressly call for systematic review of their teacher evaluation systems. They suggest that this percentage is likely to be higher for smaller districts. Two factors contributing to the absence of policy mandates in many districts may be the lack of a process for local review and of clear standards by which personnel evaluation systems can be judged. Work by the Joint Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation has resulted in The Personnel Evaluation Standards (1988). These standards provide a structure that local educational agencies might use to judge the adequacy of their personnel evaluation systems. Described in this article is a process used by two program evaluators to review a local school district's teacher appraisal system based on the Standards. This article is based on our experience using the field test draft of the Standards to judge the adequacy of the design of the teacher appraisal sys-