The headline of Sunday’s Star Tribune was, “State’s bad teachers rarely get fired.”  Although this should be shocking, it isn’t.  During my career in law enforcement I worked as a liaison officer and worked with elementary schools as a DARE officer.  After getting some exposure to how schools worked I was amazed at how little performance management went on between administrators and teachers and how reluctant administrators were to address issues with teachers.  

After leaving law enforcement and starting a HR consulting business I have been putting on HR related seminars on topics such as discipline and documentation.  Based on the need that I had identified while working with schools I figured that it would be a great place to start marketing these workshops.  When reaching out to one particular administrator I heard the response, “We have HR for that.”   This philosophy is one reason that bad teachers don’t get fired.

This all leads to the question:  Who does HR?  The obvious answer is that human resources professionals do HR.  But the real answer is that anyone who manages people should be “doing HR.”   Whether you are managing teachers, factory workers, or any other group of workers when you are supervising people you should be continually managing performance and practicing HR by documenting your actions in the employee’s working file.  The HR professional is there to consult with you and tell you what your left and right limits are in terms of dealing with specific scenarios.  But let’s be clear.  If you are running a school you should be working with teachers every day and documenting it in your working file.  That is something HR can train a manager or administrator how to do but it is ultimately up to the manager to do it and document it.