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Personnel pandemonium or positive prediction?Warren Travis White Jr. aa Graduate Student, George Peabody College for Teachers ,Published online: 02 Nov 2009.

To cite this article: Warren Travis White Jr. (1962) Personnel pandemonium or positive prediction?, Peabody Journal ofEducation, 39:6, 346-350, DOI: 10.1080/01619566209537070

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Personnel Pandemonium orPositive Prediction?

WARREN TRAVIS WHITE, JR.Graduate StudentGeorge Peabody College for Teachers

If school personnel selection policies are to be effective and realistic,steps must be taken to include, as a standard part of the procedure, theidea that predicting success for a specific teacher is almost impossible.However, the administrator charged with the responsibility of selectingschool personnel should realize that there are indicators for predictingthe probable success of a large percentage of the teachers selected.

Anyone who has had experience with the schools of this nation isaware that in the teaching profession, as in other areas, square pegshave been forced into round holes and been left to plug those holes inany manner possible. There is a remote possibility that in the frontierdays of this nation such happenstance selection and assignment ofteachers could have had some degree of efficiency. However, in thepresent-day world such a waste of potential is inexcusable. It is essen-tial that school personnel be selected on as scientific a basis as ispossible.

The business leaders of the nation realized long ago that if theirbusinesses were to flourish, a systematized personnel policy was goingto have to be adopted. Even after personnel studies were made andpersonnel policies adopted, the businesses did not make correct choices100 per cent of the time; however, the element of pure chance waseliminated, and the element of experimentation (calculated guessing,if you will) was substituted. In discussing the matter of placing aspecific employee in a specific job, Pigors and Myers say:

Placement has an experimental element, but for routine workers it is adecisive step and should consist in matching what the supervisor has reasonto think the new employee can do with what the job demands . . . ,imposes . . . , and offers . . . . It is not easy to match all these factors for

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the new worker who is still in many ways an unknown quantity. For thisreason, the first placement usually carries with it the status of probationer.1

In addition to fitting the right person into the right position, Pigorsand Myers also discuss the matter of "overselling" the job to theprospective employee. They point out the dangers inherent in thepractice of employers making unwarranted promises.

If they do, employees will inevitably become dissatisfied when ex-perience shows the difference between recruitment talk and employmentfacts. And, in whatever form their dissatisfaction is expressed, it militatesagainst organizational stability. Thus any method of high-pressure re-cruiting salesmanship defeats the long-run aim of the whole hiring process.2

So it is that business has discovered a method which improves theefficiency of the business. Whether the reader be cynical or idealisticand whether he look at the personnel policies adopted by business asshrewd business practices or pure altruism, the facts are that personnelpolicies in business which recognize the individuality of the workerhave resulted in more efficient production.

In addition to matching the worker with the job and presenting thejob realistically to the prospective employee, there is a third elementwhich business has discovered and which has an even more directapplication to education. Waite reports:

Improving the over-all quality of the personnel selected for employmentmakes it possible to minimize turnover, reduce training time and trainingfailures, extend job tenure, and improve employee morale, all of whichrepresent definite financial savings.'

Waite goes on to point out that:

It is relatively easy to identify, either visually or statistically, the verygood or the very poor candidates; the far larger number whose qualifica-tions place them between these two extremes present the major problemto the employment supervisor*

What, then, are the implications for the school personnel officer?1 Paul Pigors and Charles A. Myers, Personnel Administration (New York: McGraw-

Hill Book Company, Inc., 1951), p. 187.2 Ibid., p. 175.3 William W. Waite, Personnel Administration (New York: The Ronald Press, 1952),

p. 167.4 Ibid.

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Chandler and Petty have said that ". . . personnel administration isthe real core of successful school administration."" Moreover, it ispossible to draw from the above statements that a thoughtful, wellconsidered placement of a teacher into a teaching position can con-tribute toward an environment in which learning can take place.

A well-conceived selection program embodies sequential activities de-signed to procure the best possible teacher for each vacancy in the schoolsystem. Required qualifications are established for each position. Asystematic and continuing search is made for desirable candidates. A planis developed for the collection, analysis, and evaluation of necessaryinformation about each candidate.*

It has been seen that both business and education have realized thenecessity for applying some type of "scientific" yardstick to theprospective employee. It was implied in the initial paragraph that theschool administrator must be willing to admit that his selection processis not infallible; at the same time, he is duty bound to make as accuratean appraisal of a candidate as is possible. As recently as 1955,writers in the field of personnel selection were willing to wring theirhands over the fact that there was no accurate method for predictingteaching success. Typical of the statements is: "About the onlytangible result of research on selection problems is a stimulation tofurther study and experimentation."7 At the same time practitioners inthe field were operating primarily on the basis of "feeling" that acandidate would be a success in the classroom.

There probably is no one on whom more objective data are availableconcerning abilities, aptitudes, and interests than the present-day col-lege graduate. In the light of this, it is inexcusable for the schooladministrator charged with the responsibility of personnel selection tooperate on the rather primitive level of "feeling" that a candidate willor will not succeed.

The idea that there are objective data is supported by Ryans. Whilethis quotation is rather lengthy, the writer feels that the entire idea isworthy of presentation:

5 B. J. Chandler and Paul V. Petty, Personnel Management in School Administration(Yonkers-on-Hudson, New York: World Book Company, 1955), p. vii.

6 Ibid., p. 123.7 Ibid., p. 154.

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Measured intellectual abilities, achievement in college course, generalcultural and special subject matter knowledge, professional information,student teaching marks, emotional adjustment, attitudes favorable to stu-dents, generosity in appraisals of the behavior and motives of otherpersons, strong interest in reading and literary matters, interest in musicand painting, participation in social and community affairs, early experi-ences in caring for children and teaching (such as reading to children,taking a class for the teacher), history of teaching in the family, size ofschool and size of community in which teaching, cultural level of commu-nity, and participation in avocational activities, all appear to be char-acteristics of the teacher which are likely to be positively correlated orassociated with teacher effectiveness in the abstract.

Extensiveness of general and/or professional education, enrollment inparticular professional courses, professional appearance, and grade orsubject taught (with some exceptions) appear to bear very little relationto the abstracted criterion.

Age of the teacher and amount of teaching experience seem to manifestan over-all negative relationship with teaching effectiveness, although thereis evidence of curvilinearity, increase in effectiveness being positively cor-related with experience during the early years of teaching careers. Sexdifferences in teaching effectiveness do not appear to be pronounced amongelementary teachers, although at the secondary level it appeared thatwomen as a group may be more effective than men as a group on specifiedcriterion dimensions.

For teachers of all levels considered together, there seems to be littledifference in specified dimensions of teacher behavior between single andmarried teachers; within the elementary schools the evidence somewhatfavors married teachers; at the secondary level unmarried teachers as agroup appear to be superior with respective criterion measures which relateto systematic, responsible teacher classroom behavior.

Certain of the above-named characteristics, then, do seem to be associ-ated with some dimensions of teacher behavior and teacher effectiveness,although the extent of obtained relationships frequently has not been high.It is important here to recall that relationships and differences which havebeen noted are in terms of averages for groups of teachers and anyobtained relationship is limited by, and may be expected to vary with,conditions outlined above. The usefulness of research findings pertainingto the prediction of teacher effectiveness will be greatest when the resultsare considered in an actuarial context, rather than in attempting highlyaccurate prediction for given individuals, and when variations in relation-ship found among different classifications of teachers and with the use of

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different approaches to the predicter-criterion relationship are taken intoaccount.*

Thus it appears to be not only desirable but possible to predict withreasonable accuracy the probability of success. The only questionremaining, then, is: Shall we have personnel pandemonium or positiveprediction?

8 David G. Ryans, "Prediction of Teacher Effectiveness," Encyclopedia of EducationalResearch, 3rd Edition (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1960), pp. 1490-91.

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