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Gimme an A or I’ll Get You Fired—Student Blackmail, Latest in Ed Deform
Hot off the wire from Good Education and the Hechinger Report: a new K-12 pilot program in Georgia has students at every grade level evaluating their teachers, evaluations that will determine whether a teacher keeps her or his job.
Sounds crazy, but it is becoming more and more common for administrators to demand evaluation reform that includes student test data, evaluations of teachers by their students (and/or students’ parents), and even evaluations by other teachers.
This new trend is particularly dangerous and should be vigorously opposed by all teachers.
As I have written ad nauseum in this blog, student test scores primarily reflect their socioeconomic backgrounds, not their teachers’ skill. Value Added scores are notoriously inconsistent, with teachers being rated good one year and bad the next, primarily due to fluctuations in student ability from year to year and the inconsistency of the algorithms used to assess them.
Asking students to evaluate their teachers’ curriculum, pedagogy and rapport can be a useful exercise for teachers to initiate themselves in order to improve their practice. However, having