A teacher may get good, even astounding, results from his pupils while
he is teaching them and yet not be a good teacher; because it may be
that, while his pupils are directly under his influence, he raises them
to a height which is not natural to them, without fostering their own
capacities for work at this level, so that they immediately decline
again as soon as the teacher leaves the classroom. Ludwig Wittgenstein,
1889 - 1951. It is difficult to measure effectiveness in not-for-profit
organisations like schools, colleges and universities. There is no
'bottom-line' against which to gauge performance, they have limited
technical development and managers struggle to make meaningful
comparisons between outcomes and targets. In education, well-publicised
attempts have been made to establish - some would say impose - a set of
criteria by which organisations judge success or failure. These have
been largely subjective - the percentage of inspected classes regarded
as good, the extent to which staff is involved in decision making, the
appropriateness of the leadership shown by senior managers, and so on -
if occasionally peppered with quantitative measures, like the percentage
of students achieving certain grades in public examinations, to sustain
the illusion of objectivity. This is not to fault the aspiration
necessarily, though initially at least it created a surveillance culture
in schools that did justice to neither the inspected nor the argument
for inspection. Happily, this is changing.
