Evaluating, Improving, and Judging Faculty Performance in Two-Year Colleges (review)

Evaluating, Improving, and Judging Faculty Performance in Two-Year Colleges, by Richard I. Miller, Charles Finley, and Candace Shedd Vancko. Bergin & Garvey, 2000. 208 pp. $55.00

An enduring irony of American higher education is its ineptitude with assessment. Systematic reflection is often foreign to the academic culture, even though reflection on what is "true" or "good" is what keeps the culture alive, or ought to. One would think that two-year colleges, with their unambiguous missions of teaching and service to their communities, would be more receptive to a culture of assessment, and in a sense they are. Unfortunately, assessment in these contexts tends to be bureaucratic and managerial rather than focused on the academic and professional development of the faculty.

This book promises to fill the breach by offering ways in which performance evaluation might be used effectively in two-year colleges, which, as the authors note, now serve nearly half of all postsecondary students. However, the book's promise is not fulfilled. Administrators will not find in this volume a comprehensive resource that will help them tailor professional assessment systems to the mission and values of the two-year college, and scholars looking for an integrative review of research on performance evaluation systems that work best there will not find that either. Instead, although it contains numerous examples of policies and instruments used in community colleges, the book is largely a rehash of the more general literature on faculty evaluation and warmed-over recommendations that have been expressed more forcefully and in more helpful detail elsewhere (cf. Braskamp & Ory, 1994).

Evaluating, Improving, and Judging Faculty Performance in Two-Year Colleges sets the tone for what is to follow in its first chapter, "Assessing Your Institution's Climate for Evaluation and Development." One would think, judging from its title, that the chapter would review the evidence on what constitutes a healthy climate for evaluation and development in two-year colleges and then extend these findings to a set of guidelines for effective evaluation practice. Instead, what we get are some "common elements . . . that impact upon (sic) evaluation and development," a brief description of the Total Quality movement, a two-page section entitled "The Evaluation Process," which inexplicably focuses entirely on research on post-tenure review, and finally a section, called "Developing a Proactive Evaluation Climate," containing mostly admonitions about how evaluation should focus on improving performance, how it should be linked to institutional mission and values, how it should be regular and systematic, and so on, all common-sense principles that any administrator worth her salt should know already.

The precedent set in the first chapter continues in the second chapter, "Focus on Teaching." After some useful stage setting in which the authors describe the special challenges facing teachers in two-year colleges and propose another list of obvious principles (base evaluation on articulated values, they say, and make it purposeful, manageable, and fair), they proceed to report two surveys of evaluation practice in community colleges but make no connection between current and recommended practice. Inexplicably, they end their "Focus on Teaching " chapter with a section titled, "Evaluating Faculty Scholarship."

It is not until Chapter 4, "Faculty Evaluation Systems," that the reader encounters truly practical advice. The authors provide a short and useful summary of research on the validity and reliability of student ratings of instruction and give some generally sound advice for their design and use, including a suggested rating form. The authors do not mention the necessity of tailoring evaluation questions to course purposes and learning objectives, however, which is an egregious omission in my view. The authors also focus at some length on recommended procedures for classroom visitations by chairs, one of the least reliable forms of assessment, due to its potential for sampling error and the "contrast effect" (using one's own strengths as the standard for judging the performance of others). At the...