Wandia Njoya via fb
I’m now looking at TSC documents and research on teacher performance appraisals (TPA), and I’m shocked.How can Kenyan academics not have heard about neoliberalism and the ideological tensions around teacher accountability? How can the grant for TPA come from the British Council, and academics not be suspicuous, especially when Thatcher-land is infamous for its war on public education? How can they accept that teachers treat students as customers? How can they accept that the justification for TPAs does not include a single study on education? Some of the justifications come from documents like “Get your money’s worth from incentives.” How did that happen?
And how can claims of the success of TPA, written by the TSC officer in charge of implementing TPA, be accepted as objective academic research? By the way, the article talks of evidence of success and doesn’t provide it.
TSC’s function is HR, not education. It should not be making so many huge decisions on what teachers do in the classroom without some push back from the officials in the ministry of education. TSC is supposed to manage teachers as employees, not as professionals.
“If the commission insists that the document remains, teachers will begin cooking figures just to please their employer.”
In fact, performance appraisal is shown to increase cheating after the second year when people have mastered the techniques. This is how the government is encouraging academic dishonesty, and then blaming lecturers, parents, students…everyone but itself.
Leave a Reply