Whew, that was close!
Georgia has decided that it will not, after all, inject the input of students – including even very young ones – into its formal evaluations of teachers in public schools.
And that’s a good thing.
There is admittedly not a lot of agreement on how best to assess the effectiveness of teachers. Some want schools to rely largely on the concrete performance data provided by students’ success or failure on standardized tests. Others suggest that standardized tests don’t capture fully what a teacher may be accomplishing, and they insist on “broader measures.”
But where there should be agreement across the political spectrum is that the often all-too-flighty opinions of elementary, middle and high school students themselves should not form any significant part of the official evaluation of teachers.