Should students grade teachers?

Schools and teachers have been under scrutiny, pressured to produce higher test scores among their students. Besides producing higher stress among teachers and students, results haven’t been that great.

A more recent emphasis has been on evaluating teachers, since it’s often observed that good teachers help produce the best students. But how best to evaluate teachers and find ways for them to improve?

An article in the October issue of The Atlantic describes a new approach that looks promising. In “Why Kids Should Grade Teachers,” Amanda Ripley looks at a survey being tried by school officials in a handful of cities.

The idea seems so simple and obvious, it’s a wonder it hasn’t been tried earlier: Ask students to evaluate teachers. Some teachers may cringe at first at such a suggestion, but research has shown, Ripley writes, that “if you asked kids the right questions, they could identify, with uncanny accuracy, their most—and least—effective teachers.”

This approach is much better than the reliance on test scores, as in No Child Left Behind. While “test scores can reveal when kids are not learning,” Ripley writes, “they can’t reveal why. They might make teachers relax or despair—but they can’t help teachers improve.”

The origin of this approach goes back a decade to a Harvard economist named Ronald Ferguson, who went to a small school district in Ohio to figure out why black kids did worse on tests than white kids. Eventually he gave the kids a survey that wasn’t about their entire school but about their specific classrooms. “The same group of kids answered differently from one classroom to the next,” Ripley writes, “but the differences didn’t have as much to do with race as he’d expected; in fact, black students and white students largely agreed.”

The difference was in the teachers. “In one classroom, the kids said they worked hard, paid attention and corrected their mistakes; they liked being there, and they believed that the teacher cared about them,” Ripley writes. “In the next classroom, the very same kids reported that the teacher had trouble explaining things and didn’t notice when students failed to understand a lesson.”

Some years later, after the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched a massive project to study 3,000 teachers in seven cities and learn what made effective or ineffective, Thomas Kane, a colleague of Ferguson’s, decided to include student perceptions.

The responses helped predict which classes would have the most test-score improvement at the end of the year. Ripley writes: “In math, for example, the teachers rated most highly by students delivered the equivalent of about six more months of learning than teachers with the lowest ratings.”

Students are better at evaluating teachers not because they’re smarter but because they’ve had months to form an opinion, as opposed to 30 minutes, as is the case with many evaluations. And there are more of them—dozens, as opposed to a single principal.

The surveys do not ask, Do you like your teacher? Instead, they ask what students saw. Teachers learned that what mattered most was having control over the classroom and making it a challenging place.

This evaluation is not only more effective, it’s less expensive. The shorter version of the survey, used in the Gates study, is available for public use and costs less than $5 per student to implement. Employing professionals to watch classes and give teachers feedback multiple times a year costs about $97 per student.

Ripley interviewed a high school student who took part in a survey. She said, “Everybody knows the good teachers from the ones who don’t really want to be in the job.” We just need to ask them.