A Lesson in Performance Metrics

In calling last week for wholesale changes to the way public school teachers are evaluated, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten noted that her union had developed its plan in conjunction with some of the nation’s leading authorities in the field, including Harvard researchers Susan Moore Johnson and Thomas Kane. But it was hard not to feel in her bold remarks the spirit of another longtime educator: Peter Drucker.

For years, Drucker warned that, in a knowledge economy, there was no choice but to take the kinds of steps that Weingarten is now urging to measure the quality of classroom instruction and, where necessary, to remove bad teachers.

“Schools are . . . becoming much too important not to be held accountable—for thinking through what their results should be, as well as for their performance in attaining these results,” Drucker wrote in his 1993 book, Post-Capitalist Society. “To be sure, different school systems will give different answers to these questions. But every school system and every school will soon be required to ask them, and to take them seriously.”