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Basing teachers' pay and job security on surveys from students seems like a good idea, especially given the numbers mentioned in the article. One problem is tha

• GuiA 14y ago
  It would really depend across classes and groups. I've worked a lot with kids in academic (schools) and semi-academic settings (scientific summer camps), and I've had groups that had an awareness for "what was best for them". For example, in one programming summer camp I led, I've had kids come to me at the end of the 10 days and tell me that I was their favorite educator and a great director because I was tough but fair and expected them to learn and progress, while some other educator was lame because even though he was super nice and laid back, they didn't learn anything with him. Now of course, during the camp itself, I've overheard more than one kid telling another that I was super mean and terrible. But in the end, most of them were vocal about how they appreciated me. Kids in general tend to be very aware of and appreciate fairness, consistency, and holding them up to standards and pushing them to get better. Cases like that are not the exception, but sadly not the majority either (the specific example I cited was with French "gifted" kids between 14-18 years old). So it would really depend.
  • ryankey 14y ago
    A lot of kids mature enough to go to scientific/programming camps are usually the ones mature enough to understand that they learn under guidelines. Also, those kids aren't being graded. As a recent high schooler, I've seen kids who absolutely hated their teachers because they gave them bad grades because they challenge their students. However, this specific teacher was probably the most influential for those who appreciated him. I'm just afraid that the majority will figure out the system and use it as a weapon, as was mentioned.
• Alex3917 14y ago
  "But a teacher quality survey? That's just a weapon." Only if it's used as part of a (simplistic) algorithm. And besides, why would students want to fire the good teachers? That doesn't really make sense. (As someone who was sent to the principal's office on a semi-regular basis.)
  • ryankey 14y ago
    I agree that other factors would prevent students having too much power, but "good" is a very subjective term. Even "effective" depends on how the students learn. Just because I think a teacher is good for challenging me, another student might hate them for being so tough.
    • Alex3917 14y ago
      I mean at the end of the day it's not really an opinion question; either the survey is empirically validated or its not. At least for now it appears to be, whether it will remain so when widely used is anyone's guess. (But not up for debate, since again it's something that can be tested empirically.)
    • wtallis 14y ago
      Even if students are colluding to give poor ratings to teachers they dislike, it won't significantly alter the relative rankings of the teachers - the better the teacher, the fewer students that are willing to systematically exaggerate the teacher's weaknesses, and the best teachers (the ones who make learning fun) won't have their scores hurt at all. Students colluding will make it hard to set a threshold for "good enough" to not fire, but even if the students catch on, it should still be a good tool for identifying the best teachers.
  • b0rsuk 14y ago
    My english teacher in high school was an older, fairly harsh and not too charming lady. She was mostly disliked by my classmates. At one point they even organized a petition to replace her with someone else. I didn't sign it. In my perception, she wasn't unfair, just demanding and quite strict when it comes to grammar. Later, whenever I met a new teacher (at university, in the workplace) lessons always seemed easy to me. I had to work hard for a good grade at high school, and her tests demanded precision and attention to detail. I started to appreciate her more. Students are likely to prefer teachers with a pleasant attitude and lower difficulty level. A teacher easy to distract with an off-topic conversation. But at the end of the day, a teacher's job is to teach. Sure, a great teacher would combine that with charisma, ability to inspire and natural charm, but nobody's perfect.
• shasta 14y ago
  Right. The effectiveness of student reviews needs to be studied in a context where the kids know the reviews are important. Might be a different result.
• majormajor 14y ago
  It seems very similar to up- and downvotes. You'd want to know how to filter out the noise, but you're going to get a lot of good feedback from them. For instance, as much as I loved bad teachers in HS who let me get away with not doing anything, I never would've told anyone those teachers were "good" -- it was just that my immediate desire to slack off in high school outweighed my desire to do work on my own in spite of having a bad teacher who didn't require it. But grading that teacher as bad wouldn't take any special effort, so I would've done it.
  • ANTSANTS 14y ago
    There is a problem here: The evaluations would be most helpful if they occurred partway through the year/semester, rather than solely at the end of it, because it would give teachers time to react to the feedback. Would you be willing to honestly critique a bad teacher if it meant you would have to deal with them actually doing their job for the next few months? I'm also not so sure that everyone would be so willing to honestly critique their teachers at the end of the year, either. A lot of kids come to like their "bad teachers who lead fun classes" almost as much or more than the teachers who do their jobs well. Kind of like how many kids are unwilling to "snitch" on kids who have wronged them, even when guaranteed anonymity, I think a lot of them wouldn't want to get their teachers in trouble, even if they weren't doing their job properly. In my experience with such teachers, even poorly behaved students would act extremely respectfully when the principal came around to observe. Then again, maybe they were just afraid of getting on the teacher's bad side. Even worse are instances where the administration knows fully well that a teacher leads a "joke class" and keeps them around to funnel the "bad kids" into. I grew up in a school system that straddled the border between a middle class college town and Section 8 housing packed with families ruined by the collapse of unskilled industrial labor in the area. I have no doubt that a large number of the elective courses existed solely to fill credits for disruptive students and keep them from causing problems in the "real classes" that the middle class and brighter/better-adjusted lower class students took. It didn't matter if the class actually learned anything, the school was just desperate to raise their graduation rates. I do think these evaluations can help good teachers improve and possibly help to identify people who don't deserve to work as teachers, but they can't solve fundamental problems like "the early education and home environment of these students has failed them, and now the administration of their high school is ready to roll over to keep them from dropping out."
• TheEzEzz 14y ago
  Modify the weight of a vote based on how far the student's votes deviate from the norm over time. A historically positive or negative student would have their vote neutered. This doesn't prevent one class from ganging up to downvote a teacher on a single occasion, but if that happens that semester's score for the teacher will appear as an anomaly compared to previous scores.
• jseliger 14y ago
  >One problem is that it might give too much power to students. This is discussed extensively, midway through the article, in approximately four paragraphs: Students were better than trained adult observers at evaluating teachers. This wasn’t because they were smarter but because they had months to form an opinion, as opposed to 30 minutes. And there were dozens of them, as opposed to a single principal. Even if one kid had a grudge against a teacher or just blew off the survey, his response alone couldn’t sway the average. “There are some students, knuckleheads who will just mess the survey up and not take it seriously,” Ferguson says, “but they are very rare.” Students who don’t read the questions might give the same response to every item. But when Ferguson recently examined 199,000 surveys, he found that less than one-half of 1 percent of students did so in the first 10 questions. Kids, he believes, find the questions interesting, so they tend to pay attention. And the “right” answer is not always apparent, so even kids who want to skew the results would not necessarily know how to do it. Even young children can evaluate their teachers with relative accuracy, to Kane’s surprise. In fact, the only thing that the researchers found to better predict a teacher’s test-score gains was … past test-score gains. But in addition to being loathed by teachers, those data are fickle. A teacher could be ranked as highly effective one year according to students’ test gains and as ineffective the next, partly because of changes in class makeup that have little to do with her own performance—say, getting assigned the school’s two biggest hooligans or meanest mean girls. Student surveys, on the other hand, are far less volatile. Kids’ answers for a given teacher remained similar, Ferguson found, from class to class and from fall to spring. And more important, the questions led to revelations that test scores did not: Above and beyond academic skills, what was it really like to spend a year in this classroom? Did you work harder in this classroom than you did anywhere else? The answers to these questions matter to a student for years to come, long after she forgets the quadratic equation.
  • acdha 14y ago
    In your rush to attack hooande for not reading the entire article, you neglected to read the entire comment and missed the part about organized group effort. If you consider the prospect of being a teacher who is gay, Muslim, an immigrant (or one from the wrong country) etc. it's quite easy to believe that the risk isn't limited to a single student in one class. Fortunately the authors weren't so careless — that concern is obviously key to the repeated cautions about assigning too much weight to such tests. I'd like to believe anyone setting policy would be similarly slow to jump to conclusions but this is a field notoriously prone to chasing fads and quick fixes…
• DavidSJ 14y ago
  Only in education is it controversial to give some semblance of power to the supposed customers.
  • deleted 14y ago
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  • _delirium 14y ago
    They aren't the customers, though, not even officially. If anyone's the customer of K-12 schools, it's the adults of society who believe the schools should exist, and should educate kids in a particular way (and who also pay for the schools' upkeep). That's why kids don't get to choose their curriculum, for example; adults decide what should be taught in schools. Kids aren't allowed to opt-out, either (they can be arrested for truancy if they try).
    • DavidSJ 14y ago
      Yes, I'm very aware of truancy laws. Perhaps I should have said supposed beneficiaries.