Column: Notes from Home

Our oldest child — the one about to graduate from college — started kindergarten in the fall of 1994. Since that year two other children have started school (the younger ones are both currently at Albert Lea High School). During all of those years, in all of the different schools they attended in North Dakota, Iowa and Minnesota, they (or we as their parents) were never asked to fill out an evaluation for any of their teachers.

Two things lead me to reflect on this. One is the current proposal by legislators in Minnesota (and in other states) to “grade” teachers by how well their students perform on standardized tests.

I’ll get back to this proposal later.

The other reason I’ve been thinking about the lack of student and parent evaluations for teachers is because I teach at a college, where classroom evaluations by students of their instructors are commonplace.

For the first few years in a college classroom, assessment of a teacher’s effectiveness happens at many different levels. Students fill out course evaluations. Syllabi are assessed for academic rigor. The dean verifies that office hours are posted and kept. Periodically colleges evaluate the teaching in whole programs.

What I like about these evaluations is how they give me a picture of the semester from a student’s eyes. What do they actually hear me say? What are the specific strategies that have helped them learn or gotten in the way? The evaluations are anonymous, so I can’t link up comments and grades, but it’s still an invaluable kind of snapshot.

Student evaluations of teachers are obviously not the only thing that matters when it comes to employment decisions about faculty members, but they are important. Colleagues on the tenure committee, the academic dean, the president of the college and finally the board of trustees all look at them as they make decisions on whether to keep a faculty member or send them on their way.

So the lack of evaluations of teachers — by students and their parents — at elementary, middle and high schools is something I don’t understand. Among all the other criteria and judgments that get made about a teacher — including those aforementioned test scores — where are the evaluations from a student’s perspective of those classroom experiences? Where are the evaluations of a teacher’s overall performance from the perspective of a parent?

These are the ways students and parents currently have to evaluate teachers: We get to participate in nominations for teacher of the year. If things get really bad, we can complain to a principal or a superintendent. But along the way, we do not get asked basic questions covering how things went over the course of a semester or a year of study in a particular classroom with a particular teacher.

It’s not that I’m looking for ways to bash teachers (which I suspect is the motive of some lawmakers). Teacher evaluations can also highlight those teachers who have been truly impressive, in ways that don’t show up on perfect test scores, but might show up in better attitudes toward learning and better scores in future years.

So what about those test scores as a way to “grade” teachers?

If it’s a one-time, end of the year test, then it’s a completely unfair way to evaluate teachers at any level because too much is still unknown. At what level were students performing at the beginning of the year? We’re a very mobile society, so what kind of schools did they attend and what kinds of teachers did they have before they showed up in the one with the end of year test? What kind of support do kids have at home when it comes to reading books and doing other kinds of homework? Are those kids eating nutritious food and do they have bedtimes? Do parents know what’s going on at school?

No, I’m not a fan of tests as a big part of teacher evaluation. However, if the test is not the traditional standardized exam, if the test is like the MAPS tests that the Albert Lea School District pays for, that might be different. Those kinds of tests are taken at the beginning and the end of the school year. Those results are given to teachers and students immediately. Those tests are geared to tracking individual progress, not once-a-year performance.

Along with student and parent evaluations, that kind of progress-oriented testing might help teachers and students in all kinds of ways.

Albert Lea resident David Rask Behling teaches at Waldorf College in Forest City, Iowa, and lives with his wife and children in Albert Lea. His column appears every other Tuesday.