Superlatives and Scales

A friend from the business world responds to my recent post on teacher evaluations in Chicago Public Schools (CPS) to describe her company's personnel assessments:

We rate employees on a 5 point scale with 1 being the best. So, say out of 100 employees, maybe 10 would be a 1. There would be a lot of 2's, maybe 20 or 25. Most employees would be a 3, maybe 50. There would be some 4's, maybe 15, and there would be just a few 5's. Fives would be on warning, they would receive no bonus, and have a limited period of time to improve or they would be terminated. There's even pressure on the 4's. I don't think a 4 is sustainable over a long time. And, of course, all this is measured against goals that we set each year.

We wouldn't want evaluations to run on a perfect normal curve, but this business model seems a lot more reasonable than one which rates a super-majority of employees as above average.
And, it prescribes specific outcomes that depend on an employee's performance.

I also got some feedback around the choice of words CPS uses from people wondering if I'd find it more palatable if they used terms a little less positive than "superior" and "excellent." That would be a start, but it would still be remarkable that 61 percent were placed in the top category and 32 percent in the second, compared to only 0.3 percent receiving the lowest mark. There's also little room for differentiation. A first year teacher who shows promise should, in an ideal system, earn a label of "developing" or "needs improvement."

Other comments suggest it won't make a difference, that tenure would protect under-performing teachers even if they earned less generous evaluations. Maybe, but these ratings are the backbone of personnel files, and any employee with superlative-laden evaluations is harder to terminate than one who has more honest appraisals.