Should Students Evaluate Teachers?

Sam Maston, Special to The Big Red

Over the course of a school year, students will spend one hundred and twenty-nine scheduled hours with each of their teachers – listening to them, conversing with them, learning from them. It is during these hours that bonds and connections are made.

Just today, I met with a teacher after school with the intent of discussing my grades, and after that was resolved, we spent an hour just talking about movies we enjoyed. These student-teacher connections are important, but their full potential is untapped.

Over time, these connections can provide valuable insight on the effectiveness of teachers at their jobs. Students could use their experiences in the classroom to evaluate teachers’ day-to-day performances, not just the infrequent visits to the classroom made by administration. But it’s not just that students could evaluate teachers – they should.

Current teacher evaluation in inadequate, almost nonexistent. But this is through no fault of the school; historically, teacher evaluations have not been practiced.

The contract between the teachers and administration of a school states that after a certain of number of years, a teacher cannot be dismissed without significant cause. This is called ‘tenure’. So, why evaluate teachers if, once they reach professional status, essentially cannot be fired?

Herein lies the problem with tenure: teachers who achieve professional status do not have much incentive to do their best everyday, because their job is not dependent on their performance. This could easily be resolved, however, with the utilization of student evaluations.

A teacher’s purpose should be to give their students the means to succeed; therefore there is no one better to provide feedback on teachers’ performances than their students. Student feedback being a component of a teacher’s evaluation may provide the necessary incentive to continue to perform as best they can, regardless of professional status in a contract.

There is also versatility in the uses of student feedback on teachers. Yes, they could be used to determine if a teacher receives a pay raise or a pink slip, but I don’t think that would be the best use of the data.

As Felix Salmon, a financial blogger of Reuters, put it, “[Student evaluations] would show where schools were weak and where they were strong; which teachers have managed to crack certain nuts where the rest of the faculty is having difficulty; that kind of thing. In short, they could be tools for diagnosing and improving the quality of a school’s education as a whole” (Strauss, 2012).

Felix is right; the best use of this sort of feedback would probably be to highlight what schools do well and where they could improve, and the feedback would be more direct than figures provided by standardized tests.

While this concept has yet to emerge in the field of K-12 education, it has been put into practice by many higher education institutions for decades. There has been some controversy over its usage (LaFee, 2014), and rightly so: there are potential risks in a system like this, a significant one being student bias.

If a student-feedback system were to be installed in high schools, there would have to be preventative measures taken to ensure the integrity of the responses. This could partially be solved by students putting their names on their feedback.

This simple act would make students accountable for their words and also allow administration to take additional data about the student evaluations themselves (for example, determine correlations between student’s grades and the feedback given, or similar factors). These possible flaws, though, are fixable.

The insight student evaluations could provide is a resource waiting to be seized. There is a lot of effort put into determining how our teachers are doing.  Why not ask the students?