If you don't know where you're going, any road will do. ~ Lewis Carroll
Except for folks who have been happily residing inside caves in the middle of nowhere or who had school-age children a long, long time ago, the issue of K-12 teacher evaluations or ratings has been an involving and vociferous one. Nearly everyone has an opinion about if and/or how teacher ratings should be performed. Googling "teacher rating system" produces over 17 million results. Now it's my turn.
Evaluating teacher and student performance has a long history; as lengthy as there's been formal schools, and that covers the last 3000 years (from the Zhou Dynasty in China according to Wikipedia). Until 2001, when Congress passed the "No Child Left Behind" Act (NCLB) with President George W. Bush's enthusiastic support, virtually all formal K-12 evaluation was done by teachers of students – through the awarding of course grades. The NCLB fundamentally changed that by requiring any primary and secondary (K-12) school receiving federal funds to administer annual, state-wide standardized tests to all students in grades 3 through 8 and high-school. The federal Education Department would use these test results to assess whether the school has taught its students sufficiently well. The Act also required that schools provide "highly-qualified" teachers for all students. Information about the schools' and teachers' performance would be made available to parents and other interested parties.
The NCLB essentially altered educational accountability. Henceforth, states have instituted a variety of methods to measure teachers' performance, almost always based on student scores from the NCLB-required standardized tests. Needless-to-say, this has been controversial. The major stakeholders in the K-12 public school system – teachers, school administrators, students, parents, school boards and politicians – have very different perspectives about these changes and what to do about them.
My perspective as an outsider – for the first time in over three decades, no child of mine attends a K-12 public school – is influenced by my professional experience. This experience includes significant involvement evaluating energy efficiency (EE) programs designed to reduce usage of electricity and/or natural gas. Sure, there are huge differences in assessing EE programs' performance as compared to K-12 teachers (and students), but there's also some similarities.
In every type of evaluation, whether looking at education or energy, the effectiveness and suitability of specific types of evaluation depend on first answering several important questions:
1. What is the objective of the rating/evaluation?
2. Who/What is to be evaluated?
3. How are the results going to be used and by whom?
The objective of the evaluation process needs to be clearly stated. For education evaluation there are several possible objectives including: to identify and reward the "best" teachers; to get rid of "poor" teachers; to provide information that allows teachers to improve their effectiveness; to meet some Federal, State or local standard or requirement; and/or to improve students' educational experience. These objectives are related, but distinct. Closely linked is the second question, who or what is being evaluated; is it all teachers, just new teachers, administrators, and/or students. Finally and closely associated with the first two questions, how are the evaluation results to be used, and who is going to use them. Teacher evaluation done to determine if a teacher will become tenured is predominantly a local district matter. Teacher evaluation for NCLB is a combination of district, state and ultimately federal matter. Unless the answers to these questions are understood, accepted and affirmed, any evaluation method will do.
I believe there are four options for rating high-school teachers, as shown below. The first option, doing no evaluation, is not acceptable for several reasons, thus I rank it as NC-5
High-School Teacher Rating Method | My Ranking (based on Movie Ratings) |
1. No rating | NC-5 |
2. Rating based on Customer (student) observation & review | G-15 |
3. Administration (e.g., Principal) observation & review | PG |
4. Professional (third-party) observation & review | R-$$ |
(No child over 5 allowed to attend a school where there is no teacher evaluation). A principal reason it isn't acceptable is NCLB mandates such assessment. This mandate is indirect – teachers' performance is derived from the classroom performance of their students, as represented by the students' scores on standardized tests. Teachers whose students perform better on tests are viewed as more qualified.
I am sympathetic with criticisms of this basis (standardized test scores) for teacher evaluation. Teachers certainly hold a key influence on students' performance, but there are other factors that have at least as significant an influence as teachers. These other, inter-related factors include parent-guardian involvement, student socioeconomic status, school attendance, school resource availability and student peer-group characteristics. Such crucial factors are rarely accounted for directly in teacher evaluations. This is a mistake.
But even if NCLB wasn't the educational law of the land, evaluation is still important and vital. Teacher evaluations, at their best, would utilize an agreed-upon framework to provide useful information to teachers, parents and schools about their competence as well as a guide for future improvement.
In order to be worthwhile and useful, the teacher evaluation review process must be based on a series of direct observations by knowledgeable observers, not just test scores. Perhaps the largest question about teacher evaluation is who should conduct the observations? There are 3 choices: school administrators (e.g., principals or vice-principals), professionals not affiliated with the school or district, and education's primary consumers, the students.
Of these choices, I believe the best evaluation process should use students as the source of teacher assessments. Students have the broadest, most exacting experiences with their teachers. Of all the education market's stakeholders, students have more information, more practice with, more knowledge of and more at stake with teachers. This conclusion is ultimately based on common sense; no other group spends as much time with teachers as their students. The students are the customers of the teachers, have daily experience with the teachers, and share the most time and effort with a teacher than anyone else. School administrators can observe a teacher's classroom activities once or twice a semester, given their other responsibilities while students do this every class day, offering an unmatched perspective on their teachers' capabilities and knowledge.
I'm not alone in believing that students are best equipped to evaluate teachers.
“We’ve spent $300 million in this country on teacher-effectiveness research, and what turns out to be the best predictor?” asks Timothy Knowles, who leads the Urban Education Institute at the University of Chicago. Knowles answers, “It’s students.” Their evaluations of teacher quality are surprisingly accurate when correlated with other measurements. Standardized tests, he says, “have been gamed so mercilessly by many states that they’re of limited use.”
For these reasons, I rank student evaluation of teachers' performance a G, generally acceptable, and most preferred.
A second option is having school administrators observe teachers in their classrooms and, based on this observation, rating the teachers. This might work – and has been the most-used means of evaluation – except that most administrators have little time to do such observations since they already have at least 100% of their time committed to a myriad of other tasks. Sure, school administrators can observe a teacher's classroom activities once in a great while; but students do this every class day, offering an unmatched perspective on their teachers. Also, since teacher evaluations serve as a basis for judging the school's overall performance, administrators' assessments could have an unavoidable potential conflict. My sense is administrator evaluations are likely to be well-meaning and genuinely offered, but because of time limitations, would be perfunctory at best; and not as representative of a teacher's performance as the students' ratings. For these reasons, I rank administrator evaluations a PG; parental guidance strongly advised.
A last option would be to have third-party professionals observe and review the teachers. These third-party evaluators could provide quite insightful and valuable assessments. If we lived in a different educational world, one without funding constraints that virtually all school districts now face, I would favor either this option or a hybrid that involves both third-party evaluators and students. Unlike students, the advantage of such specialists – perhaps former teachers or administrators or professors of education – would come from their broader and deeper experience beyond a single school environment. Such professional evaluators would expect to be paid. And, given the severe fiscal challenges that every level of education now deals with, securing additional funding to pay third-party evaluators is now extremely unlikely. This is why I've ranked this option R-$$, restricted due to funding constraints.
There are clear limitations to evaluation of teachers by students. Fundamentally, the students need to be mature enough and aware enough to actually perform a meaningful evaluation, whether it is a survey or a conversation. At the extreme, it's hard to imagine most third-graders performing a detailed evaluation of their teacher. Thus, despite being over-committed, school administrators are the only practical source of primary school teacher evaluations. And not every high-school student has the perspective and acuity to offer an insightful evaluation of her/his teachers. But, there are plenty of adults that lack perception as well. So, like Mr Knowles, I have no doubt that overall, high-school students can produce substantive evaluations of their teachers effectively and appropriately.
Has student-based teacher evaluation worked? Yes. Every teacher at every school has always been informally rated by students. Remember when you were in school and asked your friends, "Who's the best teacher in US History (or Spanish or any other class)?" You always got an answer, and sometimes you could act on it.
Student-based ratings of teachers have been formalized, beyond the ubiquitous word-of-mouth tradition, at several websites. You need only go to www.ratemyprofessors.com to see student evaluation in action for college professors. This popular service states that it contains over 13 million ratings for over 1.5 million professors at more than 7,500 schools in the US, Canada and the United Kingdom. A similar website, www.ratemyteachers.com , contains reviews/ratings for K-12 school teachers across the US and other English-speaking nations.
So, I believe parents, administrators and teachers should cast aside their qualms about having students assess teachers' skills. High-school students are the best qualified to perform teacher evaluation. The NCLB process should be amended to mandate student-based evaluation as a more effective complement to standardized testing. We need not wait for Washington DC to require this student-based process. We would likely be taking AP shuffleboard classes at the senior center by that time. With enough effort, local school boards and/or state-level educators can initiate such a valuable process.
I remain amazed that in my experience as a parent of several K-12 students, there has never been a school-wide mechanism for students to anonymously tell their principals how they rate each of their teachers at the end of every semester. Any feedback from students regarding their teachers was initiated by individual teachers. While useful, this is ad hoc not systematic, and thus not really actionable except for the teacher. In many other work places, periodic performance reviews are completely systematic (and required) for every employee and supervisor – and their compensation usually depends on these reviews. Every K-12 school should welcome knowing how students evaluate their teachers, and how students' performance varies by individual teacher so teachers can improve their skills. With such feedback, the education process can be made more successful; and that's something that will benefit everyone.
