Our View: Minister’s push to evaluate teachers likely to end back on the shelf

Education minister, Prodromos Prodromou, said after a meeting with the teaching unions that he hoped talks on evaluating the performance of public-school teachers would begin soon. How soon he could not say, but the clever money would be on the minister’s hopes being dashed because evaluation of performance is anathema for all public sector unions.

Speaking on a radio show on Wednesday morning, Prodromou said there had been an evaluation scheme formulated by the late Akis Kleanthous when he was education minister in the Papadopoulos government. Tassos Papadopoulos left office in 2008, but the evaluation scheme for teachers has still not been introduced 13 years later.

There is an obvious reason for this. The teaching unions, like Pasydy, do not want its members evaluated because union power depends on the rule of mediocrity and the absurd idea that all workers are of the same standard and produce the same quality of work therefore, criteria other than performance should be used for promotion purposes – seniority, union backing, party affiliation etc.

It is no coincidence that successive governments have been prevented from introducing a reliable evaluation system by the unions. In the civil service, every employee, regardless of how lazy, demotivated, inept or unproductive he or she may be gets full marks for performance every year. In this way, employees rely on union bosses to get them a promotion or a favourable transfer, as hard work, initiative, productivity and intelligence go unrewarded.

The unions have greater blame for the lack of meritocracy in the public sector than the political parties, which are simply exploiting the existing state of affairs to promote their undeserving supporters. A reliable evaluation of workers would be the best way of eliminating the endemic rusfeti from the public sector, but the union bosses will not allow it because they know a fair system would drastically reduce the power they wield over members.

The teaching unions, for instance, are masters at avoiding the issue of evaluation. Whenever they sense the education minister wants to discuss the matter they come up with more pressing issues, such as air conditioning in classrooms, fencing of schools and frequency of exams. Pasydy simply comes up with dozens of procedural objections so that discussions never begin, a ploy that has been very successful so far.

We suspect the unions have been getting away with this because the political parties that also benefit from the championing of mediocrity at the expense of excellence, are not keen on changing the discredited system. In the end nobody wants to change the system, apart from the odd minister, who is under the illusion he or she can defeat the party/union establishment.