Rate Your Teacher
Like it or not, teachers have a reputation that precedes them and in my experience as a parent, those reputations are usually spot on. The tenured teacher did have a tendency to lose homework and to give less favored students unfair shakes. The creative and demanding math teacher cultivated in his classroom a passion for his subject. The challenging but engaging social studies teacher truly has proven inspiring.
In recent weeks, the spotlight has turned to bad teachers. In a contentious move in Rhode Island, the local school board of the Central Falls High School recently voted to fire all of the school’s staff. A similar battle is taking place in Massachusetts where, according to The Boston Globe, “state and local education leaders recently received legislative approval to take more drastic measures to improve schools, including forcing teacher to reapply for their jobs.”
In New York, meanwhile, the Bloomberg Administration is coming under fire for its slow progress in getting rid of incompetent teachers.
The upshot of this debate, and an issue front in center in the Obama Administration’s efforts to improve education, is how to create a system that better assesses the effectiveness of teachers. A number of educators have weighed in on the subject in the recent opinions section of The New York Times. As we recently pointed out in our news update, among the suggestions in those opinions are peer reviews. Absent in those suggestions are parent reviews.
As a parent, I have found parent reviews to be accurate. While the odd parent may have an individual bone to pick with a particular teacher for a reason unrelated to performance, I have yet to discover a teacher’s reputation to have been wrong.
To test my theory, I visited the site www.ratemyteachers.com where one can locate one’s school and then peruse and create reviews of the school's teachers. For me, overall ratings proved remarkably in line with my own children’s experiences. The frown or smile generated from the average score was dead on.
Such findings have lead me at ask why parent feedback is not solicited. It wouldn’t take much. As part of the evaluation process, the school could invite parents at the end of the year to a school version of ratemyteachers.com. Yes, inviting reviews may in turn invite criticism but isn’t that what our systems need? Shouldn’t parents be able take a role in assessing the schools their children attend? Isn’t parent participation an important component of education?
Like it or not, parents have a perspective unique from administrators and professional peers. They should be entitled to a voice.
March 3, 2010
Author Elizabeth Wilcox is founder of mykidsupport.com, author of The Mom Economy (Berkley, 2003) and a longtime journalist focused on parenting, children and women's issues.