Should students have a voice in teacher evaluations?

They do in college. Why not K-12?

Originally published in the Moultrie News.

This year, my child’s teacher was awful. Yet, I discovered she has been teaching for a long time and has consistently received good ratings from her evaluations and observations. I’m aware that in higher education, student feedback on teacher effectiveness is considered in evaluations. Should this practice also apply to evaluating K-12 educators?

Not formally. Kids, even high school seniors, aren’t good objective evaluators. They tend to rely on feelings and personal prejudices when judging quality. Did you ever hear a kid quaff a Red Bull and remark: “It has an acidic piquancy and complex bouquet, but its full-bodied aftertaste lingers”?

Nah. Even college professors complain that students evaluate positively what they personally like and negatively what they dislike. And that problem is only getting worse: social media, which dominates their brain intake, conditions them to believe that “like” and “dislike” are the only evaluative criteria of any use.

And what do students like? Broadly, they prefer teachers who are “easy” when it comes to work, grades, and discipline.

But being “liked” doesn’t make one a good teacher. Studies show that math teachers with tough grading standards and stringent expectations get low ratings from their students; their students, however, perform objectively better on end-of-course exams and continue to perform better years after having those teachers.

So what’s our aim? Teachers who are liked? Or students who learn? There are points where the two rarely merge, and student evaluations would only blur the goal.

This doesn’t mean, however, that student feedback is useless. It can (and should) be used internally and informally to help teachers improve, primarily by inspiring critical review.

I survey my students every year. When they judge something negatively, I don’t automatically consider it professionally deficient. I critically examine it.

For example, I require students to give class speeches. Students invariably rank this as the least effective part of the class. A formal evaluation might lead to discontinuing the practice.

But I dig deeper and ask students why they think it’s ineffective. Their reason is always the same: they dislike giving speeches.

Well, that’s not a good enough reason to do away with them, especially when they consistently thank me years after my class for having them give speeches. The experience, they say, helps them perform better in high school and accelerates them past their non-speech-giving peers.

The point is that most kids don’t use productive criteria to evaluate teachers. Like adults, they rely on personal preference. The difference between us and them is, if pressed, they’ll tell you honestly what they’re doing. Adults whip up a batch of mumbo-jumbo to justify themselves.

Student evaluations, therefore, would largely be opinion polls. And when their positive opinions aren’t based on self-serving criteria like “Easiness,” they’re frequently based on benchmarks outside the teacher’s professional control. Students are generally partial, for example, to teachers who are young and/or male.

The minute I began my career, students liked me because I was young, funny, male, and had hair (some things have since changed!). They would have rated me Outstanding even though I had no idea what I was doing.

Down the hall was Mrs. P (not her real name). She was an objectively good teacher — dedicated, smart, and professional. But students didn’t like her. They would have given her low evaluations because she was older, all-business, and uncool.

We both taught a quiet child we’ll call Diana, who tried hard, but struggled to learn. At the end of the year, Diana wrote an essay called “The Person I Will Never Forget.” It was about Mrs. P. Diana hailed the vilified educator as her inspiration for wanting to become a teacher.

Mrs. P, for all her bad polling, uniquely connected with Diana and changed her life. I, on the other hand, made no impact. Student consensus doesn’t tell us the full story. Schools must find ways to reach all students, and in this endeavor, every teacher — even the unpopular — has value, often more than we realize.

Teaching is an art, not a science. Assessing basic professional benchmarks is necessary, but further formal evaluation from students would only reveal that Monet has more fans than Pollack.

---

Jody Stallings has been an award-winning teacher in Charleston since 1992 and is director of the Charleston Teacher Alliance. To submit a question, order his books, or follow him on social media, please visit JodyStallings.com.