Business: He is evaluated each year.
Education: In the past, teachers in my district were only evaluated every 3-5 years when their license needed to be renewed or their contract was up. (With the new evaluation system next year, it will be every 1-2 years.)
Business: The evaluations involve him and his direct supervisor meeting first to set up specific goals by which to measure his success. Then he works all year with those goals in mind.
Education: We write an individual professional development plan (on our own time) but are encouraged to make the goals very broad so that whatever professional development we end up doing will fit into those goals, not the other way around.
Business: At the end of the year, he spends several hours of his regular work day (usually spanning multiple days) gathering evidence and writing up a self-evaluation to prove that he met his goals. His boss does the same thing because his boss has been intimately involved in what he has done at work throughout the year. Then, they meet to discuss the final evaluation (which factors into his opportunities for raises, bonuses, and promotions).
Education: Once every 5 years, we have to put together a portfolio (on our own time) to show that we've completed enough professional development to renew our teaching licenses. We have a 10-minute meeting with a professional development committee member to show it to them. In addition, we are observed by an administrator once for 30-40 minutes and have a cursory pre-observation conference and a post-observation conference. So far, there are no opportunities for raises, bonuses, or promotions.
Business: He gets to request (and it is usually granted) professional development that will most benefit him and his professional goals. He can request specific training, certification classes, and all-expense-paid conference travel.
Education: The school has no money for teachers to request to go to trainings, conferences, and workshops. The school does provide free professional development offerings for us to be able to renew our licenses. But we do not get to request anything. We just go to whatever is offered within the district. If we want to go to a conference that isn't put on by the district, we would have to pay for it ourselves and take a personal day.
Those comparisons could continue for much longer, but I think you get the idea. Teachers are on their own for meaningful development. If anything, the school and district often get in the way rather than promoting actual development. For example, it seems that every year our district administrators read a few books and decide that they are really important to education, so they base our staff meetings for the year on the idea/model/concept from that book. And so they spend (waste) a bunch of their ($100,000+ salaried) time re-packaging those ideas for us teachers. Then, maybe because they feel bad about the waste of time and resources to do this, they force us to continue doing them all for the next few years while they also add in new ideas. So we've probably got about 10 different "initiatives" going on at any given time based on the whims of someone at Central Office. Of course, if we are actually interested in reading the book, the original source, not the interpretation of someone who doesn't even teach, we have to buy it ourselves.
Don't get me wrong--I think my school and district do a lot of things right. For example, a few years ago, my principal decided to have us all read the controversial book A Repair Kit for Grading: Fifteen Fixes for Broken Grades and meet in inter-departmental groups to discuss the ideas in it. Then each group had a "captain" who met with the principal to bring feedback to him from their discussion groups. He stressed that there was not (that he knew of) going to be any type of mandate about the ideas presented in the group, that he was more interested in our discussions. I felt like my professional abilities were valued with that activity and that my opinions were heard. Some of the teachers adopted some or all of the proposed ideas from the book, but no one was required to. And I truly do have more meaningful opportunities than teachers in other districts. My district has brought in some prominent speakers like Kelly Gallagher and Cris Tovani for us language arts teachers.But the system in general is broken. When teachers aren't given meaningful information from their evaluations and aren't provided with meaningful professional development opportunities, how can we expect them, and the education system as a whole, to improve?
Oh, yeah...because most teachers want to make an impact on students, even if the politicians and administrators inadvertently stand in their way.
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