Opinion ID: 1967375
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Teacher Evaluation Proposal.

Text: The first proposals to be considered provide:
The employee will be evaluated solely on work performance by comparing the employee's performance with the employee's written job description, and by utilizing the mutually agreed upon evaluation instrument. All evaluations shall be fair and accurate.
1. c. Specific criteria being used in the evaluation will be given to the employee in writing. . . . . 4. Each completed Evaluation Report form shall include an overall assessment of satisfactory performance or unsatisfactory performance.
. . . . 6. Each completed Evaluation Report Form shall include an overall assessment of satisfactory performance or unsatisfactory performance. An employee who submits a written response to an evaluation under the provisions of paragraph C.(5) preserves the right to object to said evaluation in any disciplinary proceeding initiated by the District which is based in whole or in part on the evaluation. This court concluded in Aplington Community School District v. Iowa PERB, 392 N.W.2d 495, 500 (Iowa 1986), that both procedural mechanisms and substantive criteria are encompassed within the term evaluation procedures in section 20.9. A similar conclusion was reached in Northeast Community School District v. PERB, 408 N.W.2d 46, 49 (Iowa 1987). In deciding the present case, the district court concluded that the inclusion of substantive evaluation criteria as a mandatory bargaining topic has now been curtailed by legislation enacted subsequent to Aplington and Northeast Community. At the time Aplington and Northeast Community were decided, Iowa Code section 279.14 provided: The board shall establish evaluation criteria and shall implement evaluation procedures. If an exclusive bargaining representative has been certified, the board shall negotiate in good faith with respect to evaluation procedures pursuant to chapter 20. A 1998 legislative amendment retained the language, quoted above, as section 279.14(1) and added a new section (2), which reads as follows: 2. The determination of standards of performance expected of school district personnel shall be reserved as an exclusive management right of the school board and shall not be subject to mandatory negotiations under chapter 20. Notwithstanding chapter 20, objections to the procedures, use, or content of an evaluation in a teacher termination proceeding brought before the school board in a hearing held in accordance with section 279.16 or 279.27 shall not be subject to the grievance procedures negotiated in accordance with chapter 20. A school district shall not be obligated to process any evaluation grievance after service of a notice and recommendation to terminate an individual's continuing teacher contract in accordance with chapter 279. 1998 Iowa Acts ch. 1215, § 41; ch. 1216, § 24. PERB and the employee labor organizations argue that the district court erred in concluding that the 1998 legislation served to eliminate substantive evaluation criteria from the lists of topics subject to mandatory bargaining. They base this contention on two assertions. First, they argue that, if the legislature had intended to alter this court's interpretation of section 20.9 relative to evaluation procedures and evaluation criteria, it would have done so by an amendment to section 20.9 rather than by placing an amendment inconsistent with the court's interpretation of that statute elsewhere in the Code. Second, they urge that because the first numbered paragraph of section 279.14 refers to evaluation criteria, as did this court in the Aplington case, the words standards of performance as used in the second numbered paragraph of section 279.14 must refer to something entirely different from evaluation criteria. A statute must be construed in its entirety. Id. When more than one statute is pertinent to the inquiry, the court considers the statutes together in an attempt to harmonize them. State v. Dann, 591 N.W.2d 635, 638 (Iowa 1999). The court seeks a reasonable interpretation that best effects the statute's purpose. State v. Iowa Dist. Ct., 572 N.W.2d 587, 588 (Iowa 1997). The arguments presented fail to persuade us that the district court was wrong in its interpretation of section 279.14(2). It was the district court's job and now is our job to ascertain what the words [t]he determination of standards of performance expected of school district personnel shall be reserved as an exclusive management right of the school board and shall not be subject to mandatory negotiations under chapter 20 mean. If they mean what the district court found that they mean it matters not where they are located in the Code or that they express the intended result in words differing from those used elsewhere to describe the same subject matter. The school district argues persuasively that the exclusive right to determine standards of performance granted it by section 279.14(2) necessarily includes the right to exact compliance with those standards by school district employees. To do that, the school district argues, it must be free to control the evaluation criteria used to evaluate performance. We agree. The scope of a disputed proposal is to be determined by examining what the proposal would bind the employer to do if adopted by the arbitrator. Decatur County, 564 N.W.2d at 397. If bargaining were compelled as to evaluation criteria, this could result in the adoption through the impasse process of evaluation criteria inadequate to enforce the standards that a school district has adopted. It would be manifestly incongruous for the legislature to grant school districts the exclusive right to set standards of performance and not also expect that they could choose the evaluation criteria by which those standards are tested. For this reason, we conclude that the district court was correct in determining that this topic was not a subject of mandatory bargaining. PERB and the employee organizations argue that, apart from matters of evaluation criteria, there are purely procedural aspects to this proposal that should be the subject of mandatory bargaining. They urge that this is true with respect to the following proposals: 1. That the evaluation be based solely on a comparison between the employee's performance and that employee's written job description. 2. That the evaluation shall be pursuant to a mutually agreed evaluation instrument. 3. That specific criteria to be used in the evaluation will be given to the employee in writing. 4. That the evaluation report shall include an overall assessment of satisfactory performance or unsatisfactory performance. 5. That, if an employee submits a written response to an evaluation, that preserves the right to object to that evaluation in any disciplinary proceeding based on the evaluation. In viewing items 1 through 4 above, we believe that only item 3 deals with a procedural aspect of the evaluation process and thus is a topic of mandatory bargaining. The other items all carry substantive implications for the evaluation process and, if contained in a collective-bargaining agreement, might adversely affect a school district's right to enforce standards of performance. With respect to item 5, it is procedural and is a valid topic of mandatory bargaining as it applies to disciplinary matters short of a proposed termination. The rights of the parties in regard to proposed termination are governed exclusively by section 279.14(2). Under that statute, the right to challenge an evaluation pursuant to the grievance procedure of a collective-bargaining agreement is foreclosed. The statute does not, however, preclude the right to challenge the grievance in the statutory proceeding before the school board. Any implementation of the proposal designated as item 5 above must be consistent with this distinction.