Dawn Editorial Shorthand Passage from Article "The worst of Worlds" dated 08.01.2021 PDF with Dictation @ 90 WPM Below:
The worst of worlds
BY FA I S A L B A R I 2021-01-08
A COMMON complaint about public-sector teacher recruitment used to be regarding nepotism and corruption: teaching jobs being given to supporters of elected representatives and/or other influentials. Over the last decade, there has been significant reform in the way that we recruit teachers. Most provinces have increased entry requirements (the minimum level is graduation), clarified eligibility criteria and stipulated specific weights for these, made third-party entry tests a requirement, and reduced the weightage of interviews in the selection process.
The result has been a selection process in which the drawing up of candidate rankings has become a lot more transparent and `objective`. A candidate`s academic performance gets her `X` marks, her degree gets her another `Y` marks and then there is a small weightage for interview performance, where almost all candidates score an average, and then the ranking list is worked out. The academic performance of candidates, ie how well they did in their academic careers, drives the rankings.
Post-selection litigation about the process and/or the outcomes has gone down significantly, and this gives us evidence that the process has indeed changed and has become a lot less contentious. Teachers recruited over the last decade or so have gone through these new processes, and this has more or less been the case across all provinces.
But the effort to make the process transparent and based on `objective` criteria, even leaving aside the issue of what is or is not objective about academic performance, has had unintended consequences too.
Literature on teachers shows that academic performance of candidates does not predict well whether a person is going to be a good teacher or not. It is the more `subjective` and harder to evaluate elements, such as personality type, that offer a better correlation. If we wanted to `select` better teachers, we would need to rely more on interviews, performance on personality tests and evaluationsof teaching demonstrations. But our transparency and `objectivity` goals get compromised if we go in that direction, and we once again open ourselves up to corruption.
Shorthand Passage.JPG Below:
