Student evaluations of teachers is already common practice in higher education, and it is a very effective method to help administration gauge certain aspects of a teacher's effectiveness that do not show up on final grades breakdowns or observation reports. I think student evaluations of teachers would provide administrators at the secondary level with incredibly valuable insight as to what teachers are really doing in their schools. It could help a principal gain insight as to the quality of people working in their buildings. Good teachers would get good student evals, bad teachers would not. Plain and simple.

I teach in a title one school with very little parental involvement so it would not make sense for the parents to rate me. Perhaps if the parents ever came to events and met their child's teachers I would feel differently. Also having moody teenagers rate their teachers could back fire as well. Some of our best teachers are strict, students don't like them and I foresee student ratings becoming a popularity contest. This is not college.

I teach in a fairly successful suburban high school. I welcome student and parent feedback for improving or modifying my teaching style/performance. My concern lies in that some teachers, particularly in subjects that are more challenging that those teachers (who are often demanding by necessity) would get lower evaluations, not based on their ability to teach, but because students are struggling with the difficulty of the course. You would also have certain teachers who very good socially with students and parents getting high ratings, though their teaching abilities are below par. The direction education needs to go is not in tieing teacher evaluation to student porformance which cannot be consistently and equitably across teh board, but in measurable ways that focus on teaching methods. By improving the quality at which teachers teach, we as a state and nation will see improvements in standardized assessment data as a by-product. This also puts the responsibility for "growth" in the hands of the professionals, the teachers and administrators themselves as they work collaboratively to build better more effective learning communities.