pois... a educação é um [permanente] campo de batalha 'aberto'... microsoft’s lesson on what not to do with teachers... de valerie strauss... no the answer sheet...!

"Microsoft founder Bill Gates has been spending billions of dollars on education reform for years, first with a small-school initiative that he declared had failed after spending $2 billion, and in more recent years with expensive experiments on how to evaluate teachers with the purpose of improving teacher quality. In this 2011 op-ed, Bill and Melinda Gates wrote that Microsoft had some good lessons for schools about how to improve employee quality:

At Microsoft, we believed in giving our employees the best chance to succeed, and then we insisted on success. We measured excellence, rewarded those who achieved it and were candid with those who did not. Teachers don’t work in anything like this kind of environment, and they want a new bargain.

Well, it’s hard to imagine teachers wanting to work in the Microsoft environment.

Gates’ school reform philosophy is influenced by a Microsoft management practice that, according to this story on Slate.com by Will Oremus, has been cited by employees as “poisonous” to the company’s culture. The practice is called “stack racking” (and, it should be noted, wasn’t started at Microsoft). How does it work? Oremus quotes from this 2012 Vanity Fair magazine article by Kurt Eichenwald about Microsoft. See if this description sounds familiar in the context of school reform:

At the center of the cultural problems was a management system called “stack ranking.” Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees. The system—also referred to as “the performance model,” “the bell curve,” or just “the employee review”—has, with certain variations over the years, worked like this: every unit was forced to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, then good performers, then average, then below average, then poor. …

For that reason, executives said, a lot of Microsoft superstars did everything they could to avoid working alongside other top-notch developers, out of fear that they would be hurt in the rankings. And the reviews had real-world consequences: those at the top received bonuses and promotions; those at the bottom usually received no cash or were shown the door. …

“The behavior this engenders, people do everything they can to stay out of the bottom bucket,” one Microsoft engineer said. “People responsible for features will openly sabotage other people’s efforts. One of the most valuable things I learned was to give the appearance of being courteous while withholding just enough information from colleagues to ensure they didn’t get ahead of me on the rankings.” Worse, because the reviews came every six months, employees and their supervisors—who were also ranked—focused on their short-term performance, rather than on longer efforts to innovate. …"

pode ler o resto do artigo... seguindo a ligação abaixo...

Microsoft’s lesson on what not to do with teachers