Grading Teachers
Schools and administrators around the country evaluate their teachers on a multitude of criteria such as test scores and administrative observations. However, in most schools, there are no criteria that include student observations. Well, why not? Students are with the teacher more than anyone. Students should be given the chance to evaluate their teacher’s performance since students have the most time with them so that if there is a problem with how a teacher is teaching, the administrators can be aware of it and make better decisions when evaluating a teacher.
There are two major criteria that administrators consider when evaluating teacher performance. These two are student test scores and administrative observations. According to the Economic Policy Institute, “there is broad agreement among statisticians, psychometricians, and economists that student test scores alone are not sufficiently reliable and valid indicators of teacher effectiveness to be used in high-stakes personnel decisions, even when the most sophisticated statistical applications such as value-added modeling are employed.” Test scores have been proven to be unreliable, yet are still one of the major criteria that are used for evaluating teachers. Problems also arise with administrative observations. Who's to say that teachers won’t act or change the way they teach when the administrator is in the room. Also, for administrators, observing classrooms can often become a burden due to all the other things they have to do each day. For example, according to former principal, Peter Dewitt, “Observations have always been at risk of being something to get done...instead of something to get done right.” He admits later in his article that he often felt this way about the observations he had to complete. With the problems that arise with the current criteria for evaluating teachers, administrators need something else to understand how the teacher teaches and interacts with...