Research Paper on Importance of Performance Appraisals in School Systems

This study will determine the essence of performance appraisals and their need in school systems. Using Kazakhstan secondary school as the main referral point, theteacher'sand staffs performance management system will be evaluated to determineits role and effectiveness. The purpose of this research proposal is to determine the teachers trust in the functionality and the effectiveness of the existing performance appraisal adopted by school X. Key aspects to determine how the performance appraisal is developed and the criteria in which it is developed,and also determine the main stakeholdersand their roles in the design process.

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The research will use positivism as the main method of data collection, questionnaire and will be the key modes of data collection. The data will be analyzed using Excel spreadsheets, as the approach to the quantitative analysis.

Thesis Statement: Do the teachers in Kazakhstan believe in the role or the effectiveness of the performance appraisal designed to evaluate and improve their effectiveness

Keywords: Teacher performance, student performance, Administrative actions, Role misalignment

Chapter 1: Introduction

The contemporary education environment is characterized by volatility and dynamism. There is significant competition especially with the introduction of business management strategies in school operations and management approaches. These trends have triggered a constant need of schools adopting best performance indicators as their main driving factor(OCED, 2012). At the same time, education institutions are ina constant state of seeking continuous performance improvement not just to the students but the teaching staffs as well. As a result of this constant need for quality improvement, there is a need to constantly evaluate the teachers and gauge their performance about the institution's target and competition.

According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, OECD (2005, p. 26), "teacher quality is the single most important school variable influencing student achievement." The article identifies the fundamental role that the teachers play in a student's performance. This means that the quality of a teacher has a direct effect on the student's performance. Therefore, when a school as the best performing teachers, it is a guarantee that the students will receive the best teaching approaches that are the main ingredient for a student's success ensuring the most central expectations of schools.

Background Information

In the early 1990s, former Soviet republics gained independence, including those in Central Asia and the Caucasus (Asian Development Bank, 2004; Ibrayeva&Nezhina, 2011). Since then, there have been ambitious reforms to modernize education and training systems, most of which have been implemented (Asian Development Bank, 2004; Ibrayeva&Nezhina, 2011). National reforms have included areas such as education, governance, and management, as well as access and participation to vulnerable parts of the population (Asian Development Bank, 2004).

In April 2011, the newly elected President, Nursultan Nazarbayev made a promise to his people that there will be significant changes the will promote development in both the education system and the welfare and productivity of people in the country, teachers included (School X, 2013). As an approach to fulfilling his promise, a provisional education framework was structured,and twenty secondary schools in Kazakhstan were appointed to take part to try the systems out. School X was among the twenty schools, to taste the new education system approach (School X, 2013).

According to the President's 2020 Developmental Strategy (School X, 2013, p. 5), the mission of the schools was transformed to:

"To enhance the intellectual capacity of Kazakhstan through the development and implementation of an innovative, Mathematics and Science-oriented, trilingual-model of a school system that integrates the best of Kazakhstani traditions, and that meets international standards of best practice."

The school's main objective is to enhance intellectual property by ensuring that the staff performance appraisal approach is productive, and the teacher's authenticity and ability to deliver is approved through a rigorous attestation process. The productivity is evaluated from the perspective of how effective it is in evaluating both the teachers and the staff's performanceand identifying the areas of improvements and recommending the approaches to be used improve the teacher's performance over a specified period.

Research Hypothesis

This research study is aimed at evaluating what teachers feel about their current performance appraisal system. How productive it is regarding identifying the teacher's areas of weaknesses and recommending adjustments to make them better teachers in the secondary schools in southern Kazakhstan. Additionally, the research aims to determine the kind of support offered by the school administration to the staffs, during the performance management period. The research will as well attempt to find out the possible misalignment between the administration's support given and the support neededby staff and how the effectiveness of the performance appraisal is perceived.

Problem Statement

The main challenge to the existing teacher's performance appraisal in School x is that it is definitive. Its effect on the teachers, on their quality performance about the students' performance, is not gauged. For this reason, it is difficult to identify where the challenge is between the education approach system framework and the quality aspect of the teachers. Evaluating the teacher's performance at school X is key to establishing the potentials of the school resources as well as creating an environment that is dynamic and organically adjusts to the changing in the education ecosystem.Putting more focus on communication and children's performance, and formulating the performance appraisal using a bottom-up approach.

The Rationale of the Study

The main motivation for the study is the need for an effective performance management program bay every academic institution. According to Pulakos, Hanson,Arad, andMoye (2015), the performance effectiveness can be streamlined to identifying the strengths and the areas of weakness thatneed improvement (Pulakoset al., 2015).School X is one of the academic institutions that could use effective teacher performance appraisaland administration performance management.

Research Questions

Is performance appraisal an effective tool, for evaluation of professional growth in teachers? What percentage of teachers in school X believes so?

Do teachers' annual performance appraisal targets tie into/align with their attestation objectives?

During the implementation of the current teacher's performance appraisal, do the teachers have confidence in the support provided by the supervisors? Do they help the teachers in the professional growth?

Do the supervisors communicate the staff'sareasfor improvement? Do the communication contribute to the development of the teaching staffs?

Is the performance appraisal facilitating the management of staff development? What percentage of the staffs believe so?

Do the management staffs communicates their coals with regards to the identified areas of improvement? What percentage of the administrative staffs believe in their approach?

Research Objectives

The main objectives of this study are to analyze the effectiveness of the performance appraisal implemented in school X.

To determine if the teachers and the administrative staff have confidence in the staff evaluation system.

To determine what modifications need to be done to the performance appraisal, to improve the productivity of teachers.

To improve the level of confidence that the teachers and the administrative staffs have on the performance appraisal system.

Chapter 2: Literature Review

The relationship between motivation at work and job satisfaction is argued by a theory argued out by Locke and Latham (1990),and they speculate on the idea that work motivation is composed of three vital theories namely: setting goal, anticipation and social-cognitive. Considering the teachers, the great need to integrate with a response is crucial in the case where they are faced with numerous and forms of responses. Ideally, goals help to outline the significant information from a big networked database which is a major challenge to the teachers because at some point they are not able to separate the most prioritized and least prioritized goals and to have to attend to the content. However, Locke and Latham (1990) do not comment on the fact that a goal may be achieved quickly with the use of abrupt instructions and irrational logic, and how the performance of individual at work may bea reduced.

Performance Management

Imperatively it is crucial for any school to evaluate themselves on how they can direct their workforce into appraising and providing supervisory support to their employees including the teaching staff. Thus honing the overall performance and productivity at work. In one way or the other, achieving success is thinkable when there is an effective running performance management system in any organization far may it be in schools CITATION Hen08 \l 1033 (Henard, 2008). It a way of achieving a vast goal in a single shot. Selden and Sowa (2011) speculate that the definitive goal of any performance management system is to make sure that the individual performance goals match the goal organization performance. They additionally speculate how showing the workers the organizational goal, choices, and expectations, as well as their respective contribution to all this, is crucial.

Engaging some activities in strengthening employee performance is a vital component of a performance management system. One of these activities includes performance appraisal. This main activity focus is on improving the performance of an individual both at an individual level and organizational (Sudnickas, 2016). Ideally, a well-structured system is capable of drawing the goals of an organization closer to achievement while improving individual performance. However, it is only a few existing organizations have been able to productively engage their performance management systems, with some of the top leadership arguing out that such activities are of little to no value and n...