Teachers to survey students – if they choose
Only they will ever see the results
With the governor’s signature of SB 1422, students have won the right to express views of their teachers. It will take another bill, however, to win the right to actually be listened to.
The bill, sponsored by Sen. Gloria Romero of Los Angeles, is a victory of sorts for the California Assn. of Student Councils and a civics lesson in sausage making.
The bill allows high school student governments to work with teachers on creating a student opinion survey on various aspects of the classes they take and their teachers’ effectiveness. The surveys will be distributed to teachers annually.
Here’s where the “buts” start. Teachers wouldn’t have to distribute them if they didn’t want to. The answers would be kept confidential. Only the teachers would have access to the answers; administrators wouldn’t have a right to see the responses. The survey could not be used as part of a teacher evaluation or be entered in a teacher’s personnel file.
Student advocates pointed out that they can offer plenty of insights into their teachers’ performance; their assessments of teaching methods and opinions on the curriculums certainly are as useful as test scores and fly-by visits by principals that happen in many high schools. The restrictions in the bill’s final language, though, were probably not what student leaders had in mind.
Students learned that their mentors in schools can quickly become their adversaries in Sacramento. The bill was opposed by the California Teachers Association.
Nonetheless, Romero rightly claimed that the bill is a first step. The hope is that once constructive surveys are written and teachers find them useful and non-threatening, they will be used automatically by the full staff – and even incorporated as one component of teachers’ annual evaluations.
It will take younger brothers and sisters in student government to see a less uptight version of the bill through.
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If handled correctly, student surveys can be useful. Parent surveys could also be instructive. Using them to help improve instruction and learning could and should be a good thing. Customer satisfaction surveys are nothing new and should not be feared. The surveys should include the entire school and school district, not just teachers. Customer satisfaction surveys could be as much or more instructive than state test results concerning the performance of a school and/or school districts.
Pitfalls exist, but can be avoided. They should be worked out by local districts. Individual results of these surveys should not be printed in newspapers. Overall school and district results should be.
When a person stays at a hotel, goes to a restaurant, or takes their car to a mechanic, a customer satisfaction surveys often follow. These service related businesses want to hear from the customers regarding the quality of their service. They know it is good business to ask customers. They know customers may not respond, but customers like being asked. Governmental agencies that provide services to citizens would be wise to follow this lead.
Education is a service provided to children and parents. The police, fire, DMV, water and power, etc. also provide services to citizens. Surveys for other governmental agencies would be wise as well. As always, cost could be a problem. Allotting some funds for quality control should be part of the cost of doing business.
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– ratemyteacher.com. I’ve looked at the reviews on this website. Almost all reviews lack substance. And this is from people who put in the extra effort to make a review. As a parent I don’t want to see thumbs up or thumbs down from people I don’t know. I do appreciate reviews that actually explain what is helpful or unhelpful about a teacher. That way at least I have an idea about how to compensate for any weaknesses.
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While I am sympathetic to those who have to endure bad teaching, Stephen’s attitude that education is a service analogous to hospitality or car repair is deeply problematic. When you stay at a hotel, the staff’s job is to make your stay as pleasant as possible; when teenagers sit in a classroom, they may or may not want to be there and they may or may not have the maturity to appreciate the value of their education, so asking them whether they are ’satisfied’ may or may not make any sense. For example, I see VAST differences in how my college freshman and seniors react to the same teaching methods – freshman are often upset by teaching that asks them to think deeper and that is different from what they are used to (not all of them, of course, but on average). I don’t dismiss these evaluations out of hand, but I have to take them with a huge grain of salt. I also think it can make a big difference what the exact questions are; the more tailored they are to my specific class and teaching methods, the more helpful. The standardized evaluations that my department administers for all courses are not nearly as helpful as those I create for my individual courses.
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The pitfalls are rather obvious — give me a good grade or I’ll trash you in your review.
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Students are not “customers”. Education is not a business, and it is a sad indictment of our priorities to apply a business model to what we are really doing: preparing young people to think and act skillfully and critically in a democracy.
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As a teacher, I considered my students my clients just as any professional would. I sought input from my students; it was included in the grading rubric. I also asked for critical feedback from my students – some was constructive and some wasn’t. But, I would consider it a horrible dereliction of my professional responsibility to grow and improve to not seek input from my clients (or customers if you prefer).
The unfortunate impact of SB 1422 is that is establishes a permissive policy in the Education Code, which is, by statute, a permissive code. By establishing parameters governing how input from students may be sought (and placing restrictions on how it may be used), the bill limits local initiatives to do more with student input and surveys. The legislature should be mindful of passing “permissive” legislation because it ultimately becomes prescriptive should local education agencies wish to pursue the activity.
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The CTA was right in this manner, even though I think unions have no place in the schools. None.
Students should be spending their time on learning, not evaluating or anything else that doesn’t give them the tools to succeed at the next level.
There are so many things screwed up in education, and you can now add this to the ever-growing list.
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I’m thinking we’re talking about a social attitude here that we might want to think about before we go any further. I would encourage Senator Romero to do so. One of the things I’ve noticed about my students in recent years is that they are very quick to make judgements about a wide spectrum of issues that they might quite honestly not be informed enough or mature enough to make. More so than back in the day. Does society do them a service by giving them this permission? With an attitude of “I’m capable & empowered to assess this or that teacher’s ability,” how receptive of a learner can they really be. I just know that I didn’t become an educated person fostering that low of a level of humility.
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As I read through the comments above, all were interesting, but Robert’s Becker’s comment about the “permissive” aspect of the Education Code especially caught my eye. I had not thought about the Education Code that way. Ironically, the new legislation limits the very kind of local initiative and adaptation process Stephen Blum describes. SB 1422 “may” be seen as an example of legislation enacted for the sake of legislating and “may” do more harm than good.
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Am I missing something? Was there a legal obstacle in place that prevented student councils from facilitating voluntary, confidential student feedback for teachers? If not, this bill may actually represent an ironic setback for student councils because it appears to establish in state law that student feedback, if collected under this law, may not be viewed by administrators. This is unfortunate.
Students spend more time interacting with their teachers than anyone else does. If this bill helps to drive dialogue about how to cultivate students’ insights, then it may lead toward a less paranoid mechanism for student insights to contribute to the teacher review process. Until then, perhaps student councils could organize such surveys through a partner organization (a nonprofit? the school board? the PTA? The local teacher’s union?) that doesn’t require the findings to be so thoroughly discarded.
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I have to agree with Robert Becker, as a teacher I can also consider my students my clients. It is my job to give them what they are in my classroom to receive, an education. I have been giving anonymous student surveys since my first year of teaching, once in December and once at the end of the year in June, so that I may compare the results. I have to say that the findings have sometimes been revolutionary for me in my teaching, to find out what students truly feel about the level of respect shown between classmates, whether I value their opinions, or whether I push them get to the answers on thier own, for example (all types of questions I ask), is really important to me. Just because they are children does not mean we can discount their opinions or act as if they are not just as valuable as someone reviewing a service. Education IS a service and yet it should be so much more, it should be about relationships as well. One way to achieve this is to listen to what students have to say. If I did not value what my students had to say or at least listen, I do not think I have any right to be in a classroom. Of course there will always be students who do not take it seriously, but when I have 150 middle schoolers and I see a huge percentage of them agree on an aspect of the classroom, I have to take that seriously. Students spending 30 minutes on a survey twice a year informs and improves my teaching and is definitely a good use of time. I am constantly trying to improve my teaching based on the needs of my students and creating a dialogue through the use of surveys is a good way of doing so.
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