Performance reviews are thoroughly embedded in the psychology of industrialisation. Some of the earliest traced instances of the idea of annual performance evaluation go back to the 19th Century textile industry (which was driven by the slave trade): managers were judged against the productivity of their annual output, the rewards would be compensatory and consequences for poor productivity would ultimately be termination. This system of reward, based on a crude production model ultimately meant harder exploitation.

This scientific management approach was further developed in the army. During WW1, there was a need to establish some sort of ranking or evaluation system to decide who should be discharged from service due to inadequate performance according to a merit system. As many elements of capitalism, industrial psychology and social planning developed quickly after WW2, so did performance management, entering the domains of business, social services and industry, particularly for people with extra responsibilities, managers and leaders.

And as is so often the case in education, there was a mirroring effect of these broader sociological developments in schools and universities. Foucault has shown in books like Discipline and Punish (1975) and Madness and Civilisation (1961) that schools, hospitals and prisons were built according to normative principles of power, behavioural codification and control. Although he did not elaborate the point fully concerning assessment per se, there is clearly an echo of the industrial approach to performance in the end of high school high stakes summative assessment model: students are expected to perform, the results of a year’s (or sometimes more) work is evaluated and the results decide on future pathways (failure, passing, accelerated future opportunity). So a Foucauldian analysis of the structure of the end of high school assessment allows us to draw parallels with traditional performance management in the workplace.

There are three fundamental problems with this approach to performance and learning:

1. The first is the notion of performance itself, a term steeped in the assumptions of industrial production, output, yield and capital. Human beings are not conveyor belts in factories, banks or storing systems, so to calibrate their development against such quantitative metrics, which is essentially treating them like machines, reduces and in fact mechanises who they are. An employee is much more than the KPIs designed to measure performance and a student is much more than performance on examinations.
2. The second is that there is a type of learning bulimia when industrial yield models, based on annual (or quarterly) balance sheets are transferred to learning: high stakes summative assessment lends itself to rote-learning and a concentrated burst of output, leading to much of what was learnt for the examinations to be forgotten. One of the criticisms of annual performance reviews in the workplace is that they are essentially backward-looking, requiring employees to think ahead but based on earlier rather than current performance, much the way that examinations test knowledge learnt in the past whereas the deeper goal should be to predict if not prepare for future learning.
3. Finally, summative evaluation systems drive performance metric-related behaviour (as opposed to more authentic learning behaviours). Teachers teach to the test, students learn for grades, employees work towards reports and yardsticks. As the old adage goes, “we measure what we value and we value what we measure”. But what exactly is it we are measuring at the end of a year and how valid could such a measurement really be? In fact, the worry is greatest in the workplace where such a system could very well push employees to focus on the metric (financial results for example) to the point where the end justifies the means and behaviours to arrive at that goal become problematic if not abusive and unethical. Excessively high stakes systems promote cheating and gaming the system.

Just as many organisations have been turning away from traditional annual performance reviews for some time now, to move to ongoing feedback with a formative purpose, so too should assessments in high school mirror gradual progress alongside if not instead of summative assessments, this way the assessment system promotes learning and is less of a judgement of learning and more narrative of a learning journey. In order to improve, we need feedback on the fly, what Dylan Wiliam calls embedded formative assessment.  This is just one of the reasons why institutions such as those in the coalition to honour all learning are looking to reform assessment deeply and in such a way that a students’ competences, which have been developed over time in authentic settings, can shine naturally rather than be drawn out of a highly pressured and contrived one-off test environment.

Quality research has shown that in schools sustained achievement is a better predictor of future achievement than high stakes assessment performance. By continually contributing to the painting of a picture of the graduate or the employee, step by step, the learning will be richer, the organisational culture will be more pedagogic and the final goal more authentic. For those of us in positions where we are able to influence this, let’s move away from the industrial model (end of year performance reviews) to a more human-centric one (ongoing, feedback-rich, coaching-styled conversations).

(image: Free factory backgrounds from pikbest.com)