Towards A Better Teachers' Performance Management in Nigeria: The Balance Scorecard Approach

Introduction

Education is sacrosanct to national development. Education and national development are the two sides of a coin that mutually reinforce and challenge each other. Jega [1997] affirmed, “Education is generally regarded as a necessary and essential requirement for nationwide development. It is central to socioeconomic and technological advancement, and it is critical to self-sustaining and self-generating approach of positive transformation of modern society.”

The government appreciates the significance of education to national development and will marshal its supplies to fashion its avowed assignment of a reinvigorated public service. Odumosu [2004] said, “Education in Nigeria is … a huge government venture that has seen evolution of government complete and dynamic intervention and active participation. The Federal Government has adopted education as an instrument per excellence for effective countrywide development.”

It is antithetical too service delivery in the education sector is unattractive despite its strategic role in effective national development. It is palpable that the sector is a not-for-profit public enterprise. There is, however, a total consensus among stakeholders ranging based on information from government supervisory agencies, practitioners, parents and the press to learners overly the standard of education falls far below expectations.

Who is a Teacher?

Achimugu [2000] mentioned that Nigerian Teachers Union NUT (1994) defines a teacher “as a person who has the registrable professional qualification, which enables him to be appointed to teach at any appropriate level of recognized education in any nation and who is of sound mind and who is mentally alert.”

The World Book Encyclopedia [1985] expanded the scope to include “those of a school counselor, school psychologist, general supervisor or supervisor of a subject area, reading specialist, coordinator of guidance, school principal, director of vocational education, teacher of handicapped children, superintendent of schools, director of instruction, dean of students, college administrator, or teacher in a demonstration school.”

In Search of A Better Performance Management System

The largely appraisal process of evaluation that polarize the performance of educators between qualitative and quantitative indices is an annual or biennial ritual in the school process today. Unfortunately, it has become a routine. It is ineffectual while of the prevalence of teachers' suboptimal performance and bad service delivery. The process is subject to abuse by supervising officers who disregard meritocracy for the ‘Nigerian Factor' variables such as nepotism, length of service and godfather syndrome to adjudge teachers' performance and promote the lucky few despite glaring gaps in output and absence of total quality management.

The major problem policy makers and administrators face aside obtaining teachers with requisite valuable is that of guaranteeing quality service from these teachers. The recommendation of Afe [2001] that “When well-qualified mortgage holders are recruited into teaching, exorbitant criteria are ensured” cannot get done this objective. The performance of these qualified and productive teachers will not be measured and sustained if the system of performance management is defective.

Concept of Balanced Scorecard

Kaplan and Norton [1992] grown Balanced Scorecard [BSC] in 1992 at Harvard Business School in United States of America. The Balanced Scorecard is a strategic management system that enables agencies to spell out their vision and strategy, and transform them in actions capable of achieving its mission. It is fundamentally expended to determine organizational performance using financial and non-financial measurement in four perspectives: financial, customer, internal process, and learning and growth.

Kaplan & Norton [2002] said,

“We came up with the Balanced Scorecard because financial measurements had become insufficient for contemporary organizations. Strategies for creating value had shifted from managing tangible assets to knowledge-based strategies the produced and deployed an organization's intangible assets, including customer relationships; innovative products and services; high-quality and responsive operating processes; skills and knowledge of the workforce; the information technology too helps the workforce and links the firm to its purchasers and suppliers; and the organizational climate that encourages innovation, problem-solving, and improvement.”

The Balanced Scorecard is a performance management approach that is flexible and adaptable to fit any size institution. It aligns vision and mission with stakeholders' expectations and the day-to-day activities of the institution, manages and evaluates strategy and guides deployment efficiency plans. It also supports to substantiate firm capacity. The scorecard allows the institution to measure loan and customer results, operations, and organization capacity as shown in Figure 1 below:

Figure 1: Balanced Scorecard Links Performance Measures [Source: Kaplan S. R. & Norton P. D. [1992] The Balanced Scorecard – Measures that Drive
Performance, Harvard Business Review Magazine – January-February 1992 Edition, Boston, Massachusetts]

Figure 2: Howard Rohm's Design of Balanced Scorecard Performance System [Source: Performance Management in Action – A Balancing Act. Perform Volume 2, Issue 2]

Balanced Scorecard in Education

The Balanced Scorecard takes into cognizance that mission is the key driver of the performance of institutions in the public sector. In program to the education sector, therefore, the scorecard framework will change from profit rendering in Figure 2 to reflect its mission-driven nature raised in Figure 3. The Federal College of Education [Technical] Akoka as a not-for-profit institution has a mission to train quality teachers that would in turn educate learners in fewer market values of the education sector, and empower entrepreneurs to provide evidence micro businesses to boost the economy of the nation. Balanced Scorecard will entrench strategies to question the performance of instructors in the College to determine this operational efficiencies in curriculum implementation and classroom teaching towards the actualizing of its mission.

Figure 3: Design of Education Sector Balanced Scorecard [An adaptation for Howard Rohm design of public sector balanced scorecard]

There is a paradigm shift of emphasis in the focus and positions of the perspectives of the obvious design of the public sector scorecard system in Figure 3 in contrast to the generic Balanced Scorecard performance process in Figure 2 because of the emphasis on Mission in the former. Employees & Institutional Capacity in Figure 3 substitutes Learning & Growth in Figure 2 to underscore the relative significance of teachers as a leading component to synchronizes other components for achieving institutional mission. Again, budget in Figure 3 is preferred to financial perspective in Figure 2 while of the importance of budget formulation and execution looks at in the management of authorities funds.

Balanced Scorecard Benefits to Education

1. The Balanced Scorecard invents the underlying thought of consistent learning in performance management system of the institutions. It aligns all the constituents to strategy in a single framework and eliminates multiplicity of strategy institution-wide implementation. It involves the selection of metrics for the measurement processes, selection of initiatives, cohesively mould these initiatives to a single platform for strategic deployment and Spartan allocation of equipment to eliminate waste.

2. It entrenches strategic planning as a way of life rather than as a convenient alternative. It assists to build a rational budgeting method in a tightly regulated economy through finite national mortgage resources. It ties resource allocations to performance and replaces reliance on intuition in decision making to a systematic fact-based executive decision-making. It forecasts coming years outcome by generating cause-effect predictions and creating scenarios.

3. It assists to improve the institution's facilities, perception and rating of teachers in the mind of the stakeholders as well as raises visibility of teachers' activities in implementing government's reform programmes, facilities feedback and entrench a culture of public accountability.

4. It enables specialists to benchmark best practices in terms of teachers' performance and output of service delivery by paying performance measurement data collected as a explanation of comparison with global information resources.

5. It alleviates the mortgage burden on government. Education is not sole a costly venture but also an economic venture without immediate return. Balanced Scorecard will clarify the budgetary goals of the institution and accelerate its budgeted economic returns. As Colleges of Education inflations mortgage autonomy, the scorecard is planning to entrench a culture of budgetary prudence and fiscal discipline.

Building & Implementing A Balanced Scorecard

This paper proposes a seven-step framework for the implementation of balanced scorecard for measuring teachers' performance in the education sector in Nigeria.

1. Select Balanced Scorecard Team

A team must be particular and charged among a responsibility to design and commence the meet scorecard. The group will check the institution's mission, center beliefs, public expectations, budgetary position, short- and continuous goals and outline value creation parameters for stakeholders. It should obtain resource requirements to develop and sustain the scorecard, and inflate a rollout communications legislation for teachers' buy-in and resultant validation for the changes from stakeholders. This communications bill will involve internal and external public information activities to educate teachers and stakeholders about the Balanced Scorecard initiative and how it works.

2. Clarify Institutional Strategy & Objectives

The institution can design a number of overarching themes the current will be crafted to specific institutional strategies. Examples could be to Improve Teacher Education, Upgrade Quality of Teaching Materials or Create a New Venture. Certain floor of creative thinking out of the rank and file of instructors is required in order to achieve results at this stage. The team should collation of these themes. In the process, it as long as not impose any premeditated themes on the process. This ought to eliminate hidden agenda from any interest commission and allow for effective selection of individual strategies for adoption.

The upcoming level is to split the chosen institutional strategy smaller factors is called objectives. The objectives are the obvious building blocks of strategy, the is the components that make up complete strategies. In such instance, the strategy of a central theme of Improve Teacher Education or Create a New Venture could have these types of objectives as Deploy effective teaching methodology and traditional discipline, Increased Teacher trainers expertise, skills and abilities, Improved Technology Capacity or Effective and Effective and Efficient Corporate Governance, Improved Service Value, Reduce Reliance on Government Allocation amongst others.

3. Design Strategic Map

The team, at this stage, will build a strategic map for the institution's overall business strategy. This map is the mechanism that indicates how an objective [effect] is dependent on another objective [cause], and how, taken together, they form a strategic thread based on information from activities to desired end outcomes. It usually will use the cause-effect linkages [i.e. if-the logic connections]. Thereafter, the components [objectives] of strategy are connected and placed in appropriate scorecard perspective categories. The relationship with strategy components is exhausted to identify the key performance drivers of every strategy that, taken together, chart the path to successful outcome as will be perceived through the eyes of households and stakeholders.

4. Develop Performance Measures

The commission will increment performance measures to track both strategic and operational progress. At the stage, the desired outcomes and the crunches that are used to attain these results are clearly spelt out. Desired outcomes are measured from the perspective of internal and external outcomes, and processes are mulled over from the perspective of the method owners and the activities needed to meet customer requirements. Relationships among the anticipated possible outcome and the process needed to get the possible outcome should be fully appreciated before the team can assign meaningful performance measures. Specifically, the Strategic Map will be able to be used to boost meaningful performance measures for every objective.

5. Champion New Initiatives

The cluster will now identify new initiatives that are needed for implementation to ensure which the new strategies evolved are successful in the institution. The focal point of Steps 1 to 4 is that it will lead the cluster to evolve new initiatives. These new initiatives developed at the end of the scorecard building process are more strategic than if they are matured in the abstract.

6. Implementation

This stage involves the implementation of the new initiatives developed in the balanced scorecard by transmitting the details of implementation milestones and responsibilities throughout the institution to the various schools and departments, and ultimately to teachers, non-academic staff and students. The corporate scorecard will be translated to the different schools and departments scorecards which are aligned with the institutional strategy. The council must note that the most effective way of achieve the current is to start with the objectives and measures of the institution-wide strategy map, and develop supporting objectives [and measures] for the various schools and department, teachers, non-academic staff and students.

7. Post Implementation Review
At this stage, the Balanced Scorecard gains advantage over other traditional methods of appraisal because it allows of the inbuilt mechanism of post-implementation auto-evaluation. The deed of the institutional strategies adopted is reviewed to determine whether the projected results hold been attained. The team will need to align the overall strategy of the institution [that is, the mission] to ensure such a there is no deviation. Feedback mechanism is created to test the strategy assumptions to determine their effectiveness. This feedback is analyzed and public estimates are factored into the analysis for effective review.

Recommendations

The coming recommendations are offered to the Federal Ministry of Education to ponder Balanced Scorecard approach for achieving better teachers' performance management in the education economical in Nigeria.

1. Balanced Scorecard should be adopted as a performance management system for educators and administrators in the class system. The scorecard is not expensive to implement while it can construct on existing appraisal methods and synchronize methods to a single platform of performance management.

2. A national central working committee comprising of team of seasoned professionals drawn from the academia and Organized Private Sector should be set up to advance the study of Balance Scorecard beyond the precursory template of this paper and conduct extensive research amongst the objective of designing a national strategic map for the different levels of educational institutions in Nigeria from the Universities, Polytechnics, Colleges of Education. Competent and resourceful experts should be appointed to the a good amount of scorecard teams at the countrywide and local levels.

3. A phased introduction and implementation of Balanced Scorecard over a period of twelve to twenty-four is advocated. This will allow for effective orientation and dissemination of the communications plans to carry along all stakeholders. Change management will be effective to eliminate resistance and sabotage of the scorecard will be taken care of with the present strategy.

4. Government should own the nationwide plans to to approve the adoption of Balanced Scorecard and make adequate funds and resources fancy technology, and literature available for its successful implementation.

5. There should be knowledge exchange programme through the use of resource district at the local and international level. This activity will deepen the knowledge and competence of the local and national teams that are empowered to facilitate the introduction and implementation of the scorecard.

References

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