>One problem is that it might give too much power to students.
This is discussed extensively, midway through the article, in approximately four paragraphs:
Students were better than trained adult observers at evaluating teachers. This wasn’t because they were smarter but because they had months to form an opinion, as opposed to 30 minutes. And there were dozens of them, as opposed to a single principal. Even if one kid had a grudge against a teacher or just blew off the survey, his response alone couldn’t sway the average.
“There are some students, knuckleheads who will just mess the survey up and not take it seriously,” Ferguson says, “but they are very rare.” Students who don’t read the questions might give the same response to every item. But when Ferguson recently examined 199,000 surveys, he found that less than one-half of 1 percent of students did so in the first 10 questions. Kids, he believes, find the questions interesting, so they tend to pay attention. And the “right” answer is not always apparent, so even kids who want to skew the results would not necessarily know how to do it.
Even young children can evaluate their teachers with relative accuracy, to Kane’s surprise. In fact, the only thing that the researchers found to better predict a teacher’s test-score gains was … past test-score gains. But in addition to being loathed by teachers, those data are fickle. A teacher could be ranked as highly effective one year according to students’ test gains and as ineffective the next, partly because of changes in class makeup that have little to do with her own performance—say, getting assigned the school’s two biggest hooligans or meanest mean girls.
Student surveys, on the other hand, are far less volatile. Kids’ answers for a given teacher remained similar, Ferguson found, from class to class and from fall to spring. And more important, the questions led to revelations that test scores did not: Above and beyond academic skills, what was it really like to spend a year in this classroom? Did you work harder in this classroom than you did anywhere else? The answers to these questions matter to a student for years to come, long after she forgets the quadratic equation.
In your rush to attack hooande for not reading the entire article, you neglected to read the entire comment and missed the part about organized group effort. If you consider the prospect of being a teacher who is gay, Muslim, an immigrant (or one from the wrong country) etc. it's quite easy to believe that the risk isn't limited to a single student in one class.
Fortunately the authors weren't so careless — that concern is obviously key to the repeated cautions about assigning too much weight to such tests. I'd like to believe anyone setting policy would be similarly slow to jump to conclusions but this is a field notoriously prone to chasing fads and quick fixes…
This is discussed extensively, midway through the article, in approximately four paragraphs:
Students were better than trained adult observers at evaluating teachers. This wasn’t because they were smarter but because they had months to form an opinion, as opposed to 30 minutes. And there were dozens of them, as opposed to a single principal. Even if one kid had a grudge against a teacher or just blew off the survey, his response alone couldn’t sway the average.
“There are some students, knuckleheads who will just mess the survey up and not take it seriously,” Ferguson says, “but they are very rare.” Students who don’t read the questions might give the same response to every item. But when Ferguson recently examined 199,000 surveys, he found that less than one-half of 1 percent of students did so in the first 10 questions. Kids, he believes, find the questions interesting, so they tend to pay attention. And the “right” answer is not always apparent, so even kids who want to skew the results would not necessarily know how to do it.
Even young children can evaluate their teachers with relative accuracy, to Kane’s surprise. In fact, the only thing that the researchers found to better predict a teacher’s test-score gains was … past test-score gains. But in addition to being loathed by teachers, those data are fickle. A teacher could be ranked as highly effective one year according to students’ test gains and as ineffective the next, partly because of changes in class makeup that have little to do with her own performance—say, getting assigned the school’s two biggest hooligans or meanest mean girls.
Student surveys, on the other hand, are far less volatile. Kids’ answers for a given teacher remained similar, Ferguson found, from class to class and from fall to spring. And more important, the questions led to revelations that test scores did not: Above and beyond academic skills, what was it really like to spend a year in this classroom? Did you work harder in this classroom than you did anywhere else? The answers to these questions matter to a student for years to come, long after she forgets the quadratic equation.