When Parents and Students Grade Staff - education

School Administrator, Oct, 2000 by Jay Mathews

Districts must overcome teacher skepticism, if not hostility, when seeking customer feedback on classroom performance

Sam Strohbehn, a tall, athletic senior at Blue Valley North High School in Overland Park, Kan., has been evaluating his teachers for years. For him, it is no big deal. He fills out the form and hands it in, no need to give his name.

Usually he hears no more about it, although one of his English teachers said that because of the survey results she would try to organize more projects and go deeper into the subject matter. Sam's mother, Blue Valley school board member K.O. Strohbehn, also has filled out teacher evaluation forms sent to parents--a process so low-key that she could not immediately remember participating when asked about it many months later.

And yet, Blue Valley and several other school districts around the country are at the forward edge of a movement that could bring a great deal more attention--and conflict--in the years ahead. The Alaska legislature has asked all school districts to include parental opinion in teacher evaluations. A new law in Florida requires such feedback and the 37,000-student Rochester, N.Y., school district has announced plans for parental evaluations.

A Cautious Beginning

Teachers are accustomed to being assessed by their principals or department heads, but being graded by students and parents is a different and more troublesome matter. By one estimate, only one percent of U.S. school districts have invited evaluations by students and parents, but the notion of multilevel assessment, often called 360-degree evaluation, has become so popular in the business world that more and more school boards, sometimes comprised of corporate executives, are demanding it.

Many teachers are uncomfortable with the idea because students can be resentful of demanding instruction and parents rarely see what goes on in the classroom. "If they decided to be vindictive, they could really do damage to that instructor, whether the damage was justified or not," says Marjorie McCreery, executive director of the association that represents teachers in Arlington, Va.

Accordingly, most of the systems in place, including Overland Park, Kan., are voluntary, with teachers not obliged to share the results with their supervisors. In some cases they are not even required to give the forms to students or parents in the first place.

For the time being, school boards, superintendents and principals who want to hear from their teachers' customers are moving carefully and trying to put their motives in the best possible light.

"My teachers say to me, 'Dr. Wallace, is this a witch hunt?"' says Ralph Wallace, superintendent of the 5,000-student Ridgefield, Conn., school district. "I turn it around and say, 'Maybe it's an angel hunt."' In at least one district, Cave Creek near Phoenix, Ariz., praise from students has raised some teachers' salaries by as much as $5,000, and some teachers who were poorly rated in some districts have been told by principals to change their ways. But in most places the experiment has not gone far.

Even after five years, teachers in Blue Valley, an affluent K-12 district south of Kansas City, still are not required to share the information with their supervisors. Without that motivational goad, has feedback from students and parents changed teaching methods and results? Not that anyone can tell. Al Hanna, assistant superintendent for human resources, can only say that the unusual evaluation routine "demonstrates to the community that we are willing to listen and hear what their concerns are.

"The whole purpose of the surveys in my mind is to help people get better," said K.O. Strohbehn, the Blue Valley board member. "It is not a trap to trick them or fire them."

Accurate Predictions

Several studies, many of them done at the School Improvement Model Projects Office at Iowa State University show that teachers generally receive higher grades from principals than they do from students and parents. But the student complaints seem to have merit.

A close analysis of feedback data from the Lincoln County, Wyo., school district done by the director of the Iowa State center, Richard P. Manatt, shows the students were the most likely to predict accurately, through their ratings of teachers, which would do best in raising criterion-referenced and norm-referenced test scores.

College professors long have felt the lash of student opinion in popular, and often lucrative, student-written guides to courses. This brand of informal, and often vicious, evaluation is not popular in faculty dining halls. Some university officials blame the student guides in part for the reluctance of many college instructors to give any grade below a B. But many student publications that evaluate professors and their courses are financially independent of their universities. Even when they are not, the guides have become part of the culture and are unlikely to go away.

Some precocious high school newspaper editors have attempted similar evaluations, giving their classmates a chance to trash teachers who refuse to round up high B-pluses to A's or insist on lecturing from the textbook. But high school principals have much more control over such ventures than their college counterparts and usually have snuffed them out. Manatt says he occasionally hears from politically active high school students trying to convince their school boards to allow student evaluations, but the activists soon graduate and the idea dies.