All organizations need a way to measure and analyze their employees' performance, communicate results, and provide meaningful feedback for growth. Managers can do this in several ways. In his book Performance Appraisals and Phrases for Dummies (2009), Ken Lloyd discusses a variety of models that organizations can use, but emphasizes that the key to any successful appraisal system is that it should be as unique as possible to the agency. Hillsborough County Public Schools (HCPS) recently implemented a new grading model. The newly adopted model aims to be holistic in nature and includes many of the tools mentioned by Lloyd (employee self-assessment, journaling, benchmarking and essay method). Kriete, an HCPS teacher, summarized the difficulty in creating a performance evaluation model for educators: Quality teaching is much harder to quantify than sales, service, or customer satisfaction. I believe there are so many variables in every classroom, school, course, and every student, that evaluating effective teaching is much more difficult than evaluating business performance. (Goodland & Kriete, 2012, para. 22) A Call for ChangeHCPS is the largest employer in the Tampa Bay metropolitan area. It is the eighth largest school district in the nation and employs more than 10,000 teachers. Prior to the 2010-11 school year, administrators relied on the Florida Performance Measurement System (FPMS) to evaluate teacher effectiveness. Under this system, a third of teachers in the 2007/2008 school year achieved perfect scores, indicating that there was no need for improvement. 99.5% of teachers were rated “satisfactory” or “outstanding” (Marshall, 2010). If our teachers were doing... middle of the paper......5fbdc9530eb9_story.htmlLloyd, K. (2009). Performance reviews and phrases for dummies. Indianapolis, IN: WileyPublishing Inc. Marshall, T. (2010, April 20). Hillsborough Hires 100 Peer Evaluators for $100M Gates Reform. Tampa Bay Times. Retrieved from http://www.tampabay.com/news/education/k12/hillsborough-hires-100-peer-evaluators-for-its-100-million-gates-reforms/1088786 Segal, J.A. (2011, January 14) . The Dirty Dozen of Performance Evaluation Errors. Bloomberg Business Week. Retrieved from http://www.businessweek.com/managing/content/jan2011/ca20110114_156455.htm#p1 Wooton, A. L., Tyler, J. H., Kane, T. J. (2011). Evaluate teacher effectiveness. Can classroom observations identify practices that increase achievement? Education Next 11(3), Retrieved from http://educationnext.org/evaluating-teacher-effectiveness/