I spent most of the afternoon today listening to an attorney discuss how to fire school employees without getting into trouble. I have heard all of this before, but a refresher in school law never hurt anyone! Firing a teacher or even a bus driver can be tricky and you can mess yourself up if you are not careful. Hopefully this is something I will rarely have to do, but you never know!

The attorney told us that the big problem was inaccurate evaluations over the years. You have a principal or superintendent who wants to be liked by the staff and fluffs over obvious problems during the evaluation process. At some future point a new principal comes in, sees the teacher in action, and moves to get rid of them. There are years worth of positive evaluations and now here comes a bad one. The teacher can make a case in court that the new principal is biased for some reason. After all, they have all these years of good evaluations and now one bad one.

It is challenging to fairly but rigorously evaluate people. I view it is a professional responsibility I have to the teacher and to the students. The teacher cannot improve if I do not give them objective feedback on their performance. This can also cause a morale problem with other teachers if they see someone not doing their job properly and nothing being done about it. Many times the problem is that administrators want to be liked, don’t want to cause waves, and gloss over obvious problems. If a teacher has been performing poorly for years it is just as much the administrator’s fault as it is the teacher’s. Part of my job is to honestly evaluate teacher performance. I have a duty to correct poor performance. The evaluative power can be abused, either by not critically evaluating poor performance or by a negative evaluation of someone with whom the administrator has personal disagreements. Neither one is the right thing to do.

The biggest challenge for anyone doing evaluations is to set aside the personal and focus on the professional. You may really like someone as a person but their performance is not up to snuff. You may dislike them personally but they do a great job in the classroom. You have to set aside your own personal biases and focus objectively on what you see. I’m sure this is true in any profession.

This brings up an old question. Can you be friends with someone who works for you? Can you go out for beer with them on Saturday night and professionally evaluate them on Monday morning? Will it damage the friendship or mess up the professional relationship? Can one truly separate the personal and the professional side of their lives? How about the perception from the rest of the staff? Will they think you are playing favorites? I have seen such issues crop off before.

I hope you all had a wonderful weekend!