4 ms·

> In the jobs that I do, "bad performance" is super subjective and very hard to measure. It's also the common canard to use from the managerial class to get rid

> In the jobs that I do, "bad performance" is super subjective and very hard to measure. It's also the common canard to use from the managerial class to get rid of someone they don't like. Are you serious? This line of thinking is exactly why I'm against union. It is really not that hard to tell who are the bad performers. There will be false judgement, but the rate is low. If you want to avoid any false results, well, I don't know what world you live in. And look at teacher's unions across the US. What kind of damage did they do to our kids? The infamous Principal's Ball as described in Waiting For Superman should make any sane person's blood boil.

rootsofallevil 6y ago
>There will be false positives, but the rate is low What do you base this on? My experience is that if you are perceived to be good you can get away with being a low performer for a lot longer than if you are not perceived to be good, I have seen it quite a few times.
- hwbehrens 6y ago
  Wouldn't that be a false negative? A false positive would be when a high-performer is perceived as being a low-performer, and terminated for that reason despite their superior productivity. I can certainly imagine this occurring, especially to employees who are socially deficient, but then you start to get into the quagmire of politically- and socially-motivated terminations, which I think is outside the scope of this discussion.
  - hintymad 6y ago
    You're right. Edited the comment accordingly. Both false positives and false negatives exist.
whimsicalism 6y ago
I think it's pretty silly to suggest that that the failure of public schools is just due to teacher unions. I went to a very similar school system as the one in Waiting For Superman and there are a whole litany of issues I would put before teacher unions in terms of what is afflicting our urban schools, top on the list is: a. incompetent administration b. failure to desegregate our schools.
- old_fart_dev 6y ago
  > failure to desegregate our schools Beyond the oblivious benefits of having different communities of students commingle, how does desegregation help poorer performing school? I was under the impression desegregation was more about providing more equal access to better run schools than improving poorer preforming school.
  - whimsicalism 6y ago
    > how does desegregation help poorer performing school 1. There are studies showing that socioeconomic and racial diversity in schools (which often go hand and hand in urban contexts) have huge measurable positive impacts on people from less advantaged backgrounds, and no impact on people from more advantaged backgrounds. 2. Affluent families often have more time to devote towards advocating for improvements in their school. Incompetent administrations get shielded when there aren't parent watchdogs. 3. Hate to say it, but high-quality teacher retention is very difficult in schools that are close to entirely black &/or poor. It is much easier to create two high-quality socioeconomically diverse schools than it is to create two high-quality schools one which has mostly rich white students and one which has mostly poor black students. I definitely do not have all the solutions though. I'm not really sure if desegregation in many coastal cities is even possible right now while private schools remain. White private school attendance is very related to school system diversity.
    - old_fart_dev 6y ago
      > I'm not really sure if desegregation in many coastal cities is even possible right now while private schools remain. It's not just a problem of private schools - it's families having the ability to move to a different district. If you're affluent enough, no one can force you to send your kid to a given school. They want to bus your kid? Move to the suburbs. They want to bus from the suburbs? Send your kid to private or religious school? Ban those? Hire a nanny/tutor. So forth and so on. As you pointed out, there's not benefit academically for these advantaged kids, so this understandable why there's push back. Some people aren't going to value being exposed to other communities enough to outweigh the inconvenience of busing their kids. We could try to make these communities more desirable to live in, but 1) we're assuming we haven't tried making them desirable (and if not, why not), and 2) we risk pushing out the poorest of the community and negating the benefits for those families. It's a big, hard problem - how do you go about improving a failing school in a poor neighborhood without changing the neighbors in the neighborhood? I was too young to remember the 70s, but, from what I understand, busing occurred mostly between neighborhoods in the city, often moving kids from one poor community to another. If you were in a neighborhood with nicer schools and busing was enforced, you moved. And the politicians and judges enforcing busing certainly didn't send their kids to these schools - if they lived in these communities at all. Unless we start telling people where they can live and how they can raise their children, I don't think this path is viable.
standardUser 6y ago
"It is really not that hard to tell who are the bad performers." That sounds like an entitled viewpoint. Imagine how it feels to be someone of a different skin color or hair style or manner of speaking and living in a society where, as a middling performer, any boss you have can fire you for "poor performance" with no other explanation required. Without that life experience, perhaps it is hard to view that situation as problematic. But for people with those experiences, they would prefer a system that has some insulation between them and the whims of their (mostly white, male, higher class) bosses.
- hintymad 6y ago
  > a different skin color or hair style or manner of speaking and living i Yeah, right. It's all about racism. As for volumes of research on performance management and management in general, they are just charade by white supremacists, right? Oh, and what about Asian people, in particular Indians, going all the way to CEOs and college principals and high-ranking government officials? Let me guess, they are white? If you think so, well, let's just say some people are racists to the bone, no matter how "progressive" they say.

rootsofallevil 6y ago

>There will be false positives, but the rate is low What do you base this on? My experience is that if you are perceived to be good you can get away with being a low performer for a lot longer than if you are not perceived to be good, I have seen it quite a few times.

hwbehrens 6y ago
Wouldn't that be a false negative? A false positive would be when a high-performer is perceived as being a low-performer, and terminated for that reason despite their superior productivity. I can certainly imagine this occurring, especially to employees who are socially deficient, but then you start to get into the quagmire of politically- and socially-motivated terminations, which I think is outside the scope of this discussion.
- hintymad 6y ago
  You're right. Edited the comment accordingly. Both false positives and false negatives exist.

whimsicalism 6y ago

I think it's pretty silly to suggest that that the failure of public schools is just due to teacher unions. I went to a very similar school system as the one in Waiting For Superman and there are a whole litany of issues I would put before teacher unions in terms of what is afflicting our urban schools, top on the list is: a. incompetent administration b. failure to desegregate our schools.

old_fart_dev 6y ago
> failure to desegregate our schools Beyond the oblivious benefits of having different communities of students commingle, how does desegregation help poorer performing school? I was under the impression desegregation was more about providing more equal access to better run schools than improving poorer preforming school.
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  > how does desegregation help poorer performing school 1. There are studies showing that socioeconomic and racial diversity in schools (which often go hand and hand in urban contexts) have huge measurable positive impacts on people from less advantaged backgrounds, and no impact on people from more advantaged backgrounds. 2. Affluent families often have more time to devote towards advocating for improvements in their school. Incompetent administrations get shielded when there aren't parent watchdogs. 3. Hate to say it, but high-quality teacher retention is very difficult in schools that are close to entirely black &/or poor. It is much easier to create two high-quality socioeconomically diverse schools than it is to create two high-quality schools one which has mostly rich white students and one which has mostly poor black students. I definitely do not have all the solutions though. I'm not really sure if desegregation in many coastal cities is even possible right now while private schools remain. White private school attendance is very related to school system diversity.
  - old_fart_dev 6y ago
    > I'm not really sure if desegregation in many coastal cities is even possible right now while private schools remain. It's not just a problem of private schools - it's families having the ability to move to a different district. If you're affluent enough, no one can force you to send your kid to a given school. They want to bus your kid? Move to the suburbs. They want to bus from the suburbs? Send your kid to private or religious school? Ban those? Hire a nanny/tutor. So forth and so on. As you pointed out, there's not benefit academically for these advantaged kids, so this understandable why there's push back. Some people aren't going to value being exposed to other communities enough to outweigh the inconvenience of busing their kids. We could try to make these communities more desirable to live in, but 1) we're assuming we haven't tried making them desirable (and if not, why not), and 2) we risk pushing out the poorest of the community and negating the benefits for those families. It's a big, hard problem - how do you go about improving a failing school in a poor neighborhood without changing the neighbors in the neighborhood? I was too young to remember the 70s, but, from what I understand, busing occurred mostly between neighborhoods in the city, often moving kids from one poor community to another. If you were in a neighborhood with nicer schools and busing was enforced, you moved. And the politicians and judges enforcing busing certainly didn't send their kids to these schools - if they lived in these communities at all. Unless we start telling people where they can live and how they can raise their children, I don't think this path is viable.

standardUser 6y ago

"It is really not that hard to tell who are the bad performers." That sounds like an entitled viewpoint. Imagine how it feels to be someone of a different skin color or hair style or manner of speaking and living in a society where, as a middling performer, any boss you have can fire you for "poor performance" with no other explanation required. Without that life experience, perhaps it is hard to view that situation as problematic. But for people with those experiences, they would prefer a system that has some insulation between them and the whims of their (mostly white, male, higher class) bosses.

hintymad 6y ago
> a different skin color or hair style or manner of speaking and living i Yeah, right. It's all about racism. As for volumes of research on performance management and management in general, they are just charade by white supremacists, right? Oh, and what about Asian people, in particular Indians, going all the way to CEOs and college principals and high-ranking government officials? Let me guess, they are white? If you think so, well, let's just say some people are racists to the bone, no matter how "progressive" they say.