Program Director Evaluation ... or not
One of the LSB's responsibilities is to "F. To prepare an annual written evaluation of the station's Program Director" (Pacifica's bylaws). This job is especially important for WBAI, given that we are losing membership. A fair and thorough evaluation of the PD is necessary to understand what is going wrong at WBAI.
But that's not what happened on the "Justice and Unity"-controlled LSB. Instead, an evaluation "process" was put in place guaranteed to produce the result they wanted. Typically, they handed off most of the work to staff allies who are not even on the LSB.
Since we don't have an honest evaluation, we cannot know what role, if any, the program director has played in WBAI's decline.
Here are the details:
- The LSB shirked the task for several years - only one evaluation of the PD has been done in the past three years. It was produced in May 2007.
- The evalution committee was chaired by the Program Director's personal assistant, who has never been an LSB member.
- She kept confidential staff survey responses in her apartment, and then let her radio co-host "summarize" them (who also has never been an LSB member).
- Seventy-five percent of the evaluation was a self-evaluation, without documentation.
- The people who worked closest with the PD on programming - the department heads - were not interviewed.
- LSB members were not allowed to contribute to the evaluation.
- The LSB was not allowed to sign off on the evaluation after it was completed!
- the staff surveys on which a small section of the evaluation was based were 18 months old.
The fact that the "Justice and Unity" LSB put forward such a questionable and biased process to evaluate the station's most important employee shows their lack of commitment to their governance responsibilities.