An Administrator's Guide to California Private School Law

Chapter 5 – Employee Evaluations

 Magical Thinking - Supervisors often hope the problem will resolve itself and go away on its own.  Employee Backlash - Supervisors worry that critical feedback will cause employees to “go on the offensive” against the supervisor, stir up problems, and generally create tension and an unpleasant work environment.

None of these are valid reasons for avoiding giving accurate evaluations, and often create more work and exacerbate the problems this avoidance reasoning is trying to circumvent. The effects of not giving accurate evaluations are too detrimental to the school to ignore. Supervisors must provide employees with timely, accurate performance evaluations to protect the school and to be fair to the employee.

Section 3 T HE I MPACT O F N OT G IVING A CCURATE P ERFORMANCE E VALUATIONS Not giving accurate performance evaluations has significant negative consequences. They include:  Lose Important Communication Tool – An inaccurate evaluation will not notify the employee of performance issues or give the employee a fair opportunity to correct these performance issues. Performance issues that are managed properly when they are new or minor can often be handled through coaching, professional development, or mentoring. This is especially true for new teachers. Employees correctly feel it is unfair to let issues simmer and grow until the problem is too big to ignore.  Inaccurate Record of Employee’s Performance – Performance evaluations are the school’s official record of an employee’s performance. A performance evaluation that does not identify the employee’s

performance deficiencies means the school has an inaccurate record of the employee’s performance. The presumption is that performance problems not identified in evaluations do not exist. Conversely, employees who are performing well or have shown marked improvement deserve praise and should have a record to demonstrate their success.  Reduces Ability to Take Needed Disciplinary Action – Not identifying deficiencies in performance evaluations turns a legally defensible employment termination into a legally risky employment termination. Schools end up keeping these employees for longer than is best for the school and the students while an accurate record is developed.  Severance Packages – Schools in this position are forced to use valuable school resources on severance packages that would have been unnecessary or much smaller if the record of performance deficiencies had been clearly documented.

An Administrator’s Guide to California Private School Law ©2019 Liebert Cassidy Whitmore 132