You hear it all the time, that schools should be accountable same as the workplace.

Merit pay, determined by performance evaluations, rewards high performing employees and creates a highly competitive, successful workplace. Conversely, workers that do poorly as measured by their employee evaluations will be weeded out. It all works for the good of the company and its profit line and/or mission. Produce and we will reward; don’t produce and we will get rid of you.

So, shouldn’t this be extended to schools? Would it be just that simple to use tests to determine the performance of a student, a school, a teacher, an administrator, and give bonuses to those who score high and improve the most, while weeding out those with persistently low scores?

It makes sense, right?

Hey, wait a minute. Richard Rothstein has written two very fine pieces that examine such practices in the workplace and whether they are being appropriately and adequately translated to the schools.

The crux of the matter here is that the workplace has long moved away from such simple measures to evaluate performance. Even in a sales-based situations, simple numbers are only a portion of what is a much more complex, subjective set of measurements used to determine performance and possible rewards and consequences. So, the idea of building teacher tenure around test scores because that’s how it’s done in corporate America just doesn’t hold water.

Here are the two Rothstein reports. The first one, shorter than the second, is a good place to start. He’s on to something very important. And yes, it is also about arts education.

The Corruption of School Accountability

Holding Accountability to Account: How Scholarship and Experience in Other Fields Inform Exploration of Performance Incentives in Education