When Parents and Students Grade Staff.

Districts must overcome teacher skepticism, if not hostility, when seeking customer feedback on classroom performance

Sam Strohbehn, a tall, athletic senior at Blue Valley North High School in Overland Park, Kan., has been evaluating his teachers for years. For him, it is no big deal. He fills out the form and hands it in, no need to give his name.

Usually he hears no more about it, although one of his English teachers said that because of the survey results she would try to organize more projects and go deeper into the subject matter. Sam's mother, Blue Valley school board member K.O. Strohbehn, also has filled out teacher evaluation forms sent to parents--a process so low-key that she could not immediately remember participating when asked about it many months later.

And yet, Blue Valley and several other school districts around the country are at the forward edge of a movement that could bring a great deal more attention--and conflict--in the years ahead. The Alaska legislature has asked all school districts to include parental opinion in teacher evaluations. A new law in Florida requires such feedback and the 37,000-student Rochester, N.Y., school district has announced plans for parental evaluations.

A Cautious Beginning

Teachers are accustomed to being assessed by their principals or department heads, but being graded by students and parents is a different and more troublesome matter. By one estimate, only one percent of U.S. school districts have invited evaluations by students and parents, but the notion of multilevel assessment, often called 360-degree evaluation, has become so popular in the business world that more and more school boards, sometimes comprised of corporate executives, are demanding it.

Many teachers are uncomfortable with the idea because students can be resentful of demanding instruction and parents rarely see what goes on in the classroom. "If they decided to be vindictive, they could really do damage to that instructor, whether the damage was justified or not," says Marjorie McCreery, executive director of the association that represents teachers in Arlington, Va.

Accordingly, most of the systems in place, including Overland Park, Kan., are voluntary, with teachers not obliged to share the results with their supervisors. In some cases they are not even required to give the forms to students or parents in the first place.

For the time being, school boards, superintendents and principals who want to hear from their teachers' customers are moving carefully and trying to put their motives in the best possible light.

"My teachers say to me, 'Dr. Wallace, is this a witch hunt?"' says Ralph Wallace, superintendent of the 5,000-student Ridgefield, Conn., school district. "I turn it around and say, 'Maybe it's an angel hunt."' In at least one district, Cave Creek near Phoenix, Ariz., praise from students has raised some teachers' salaries by as much as $5,000, and some teachers who were poorly rated in some districts have been told by principals to change their ways. But in most places the experiment has not gone far.

Even after five years, teachers in Blue Valley, an affluent K-12 district south of Kansas City, still are not required to share the information with their supervisors. Without that motivational goad, has feedback from students and parents changed teaching methods and results? Not that anyone can tell. Al Hanna, assistant superintendent for human resources, can only say that the unusual evaluation routine "demonstrates to the community that we are willing to listen and hear what their concerns are.

"The whole purpose of the surveys in my mind is to help people get better," said K.O. Strohbehn, the Blue Valley board member. "It is not a trap to trick them or fire them."

Accurate Predictions

Several studies, many of them done at the School Improvement Model Projects Office at Iowa State University show that teachers generally receive higher grades from principals than they do from students and parents. But the student complaints seem to have merit.

A close analysis of feedback data from the Lincoln County, Wyo., school district done by the director of the Iowa State center, Richard P. Manatt, shows the students were the most likely to predict accurately, through their ratings of teachers, which would do best in raising criterion-referenced and norm-referenced test scores.

College professors long have felt the lash of student opinion in popular, and often lucrative, student-written guides to courses. This brand of informal, and often vicious, evaluation is not popular in faculty dining halls. Some university officials blame the student guides in part for the reluctance of many college instructors to give any grade below a B. But many student publications that evaluate professors and their courses are financially independent of their universities. Even when they are not, the guides have become part of the culture and are unlikely to go away.

Some precocious high school newspaper editors have attempted similar evaluations, giving their classmates a chance to trash teachers who refuse to round up high B-pluses to A's or insist on lecturing from the textbook. But high school principals have much more control over such ventures than their college counterparts and usually have snuffed them out. Manatt says he occasionally hears from politically active high school students trying to convince their school boards to allow student evaluations, but the activists soon graduate and the idea dies.

Some high school teachers, particularly in private schools, make it a point to seek student opinion on their courses. At Sidwell Friends, a private school in Washington, D.C., many teachers have cooperated with a student-organized system of year-end evaluations.

"It's not a rating," says Nathaniel Pincus-Roth, a Yale freshman who filled out several such forms while he was at Sidwell. "It is just answers to questions like, what was the atmosphere of the class, was the teacher well-prepared, was there more class discussion or lecture."

Teachers were not obliged to share their reviews with their supervisors, a drawback in Pincus-Roth's view. But student leaders who set up the system thought it was unfair to pass on anonymous comments to department heads or to the principal. Pincus-Roth says he does not know of any case in which a teacher made any changes in response to student comments.

Ellis Turner, spokesman for Sidwell Friends, says teachers at the school find the surveys useful and often make changes in light of them. Students may not notice the difference, he adds, "because they may not have that teacher again."

Divergent Views

According to a report by a subcommittee studying teacher evaluation for the Syracuse, N.Y., City Schools, parents and teachers long have been ignored in teacher evaluations. A 1988 study by the Educational Research Service showed only three percent of schools used students and only one percent used parents as sources of feedback data. One 1987 study said parent evaluations were useless, but the conclusion was based on a program that asked parents to volunteer to take a one-hour course in making classroom observations--not likely to appeal to most busy mothers and fathers.

Researcher Laura R. Ostrander, now a consultant to the Virginia Beach, Va., schools, compared ratings of teachers by principals, parents, students and the teachers themselves in a 1995 paper. All the ratings were high, but there were subtle differences.

Principals consistently rated the teachers higher than any of the other respondents on all subcategories except homework, where the teacher self-assessments were higher, her report stated. The students gave the teachers the lowest ratings in all areas; the parents the second lowest. Additionally, parent ratings showed a higher correlation with student ratings than with teacher or principal ratings.

Teachers know that parents and students are not going to treat them as kindly as the educators with whom they work, and most attempts to add those voices have been resisted. "It gets so adversarial right away," says Manatt, who has tried to develop assessment techniques that will reduce such fears. "Teachers get paranoid and parents get paranoid."

A Hostile Response

Witness what happened last year when a parents group at the Boston Latin School, one of the most highly regarded public high schools in the country, asked the families of all 2,300 students to evaluate individual faculty members. The results were sold at last fall's Open House-- a dollar for each pink-covered booklet. Most teachers received good reviews, but some did not. When the parents began to distribute surveys for this year's edition, one teacher asked that they be arrested if they set foot on school grounds.

"The reaction of most, though not all, staff was completely negative and hostile," says Bob Tumposky, a computer systems manager and parent of a Boston Latin senior.

Tumposky had the original idea for the booklet and was angry that the headmaster "would not even agree to the routine funding request this year from the parents group for the survey, even though all the money requested was raised from parents' donations and the survey had been funded last year."

Evaluators have complained for some time of the difficulty of getting parents and students to participate in such surveys. The Boston Latin effort was no exception. Only 360 students filled out the forms, and some teachers were judged on the basis of only 15 students.

Tumposky says he thinks the faculty has improved compared to previous decades when many Boston teachers nearing retirement chose Boston Latin because of the ease of teaching its exceptionally bright and motivated students. The survey, he says, revealed "a small number of wonderful teachers and a smaller number of catastrophes."

The new guide will be out this fall, Tumposky adds, but he already is pleased with the results. "The teacher evaluation process has already begun to improve," he says. In private meetings with administrators, parents have been told "certain teachers who are really bad will be fired and more administrators are observing in classrooms," he says.

A Systematic Process

Administrators in the 72,000-student Mesa, Ariz., school system tried a more gradual approach in introducing their system of student evaluations of teachers. Fred Skoglund, assistant superintendent, says two years of design were followed by three years of implementation, as the goals that teachers were asked to reach in the classroom were introduced into student questionnaires.

Each December the students in two of each secondary school teacher's classes--one chosen by the teacher and one chosen by the principal--fill out evaluation forms. It takes only five to 10 minutes, with the exercise supervised and the forms collected by someone other than the teacher being evaluated. The results are just one of many factors in the teacher's formal evaluation process.

In some cases, Skoglund says, the students buttress an already favorable impression. But if a principal has concerns about a teacher's effectiveness, and the principal suggests the teacher had not correctly assessed what is going on in the classroom, the student evaluations become crucial.

Some principals also evaluate elementary school teachers, taking over their classes for a few minutes and asking them questions about how things are going. In the evaluation system Manatt and his team have developed at Iowa State, an evaluator can administer a questionnaire even to kindergartners. He explains what he wants to know about their teacher -- for instance, does he answer all your questions?--and then has them circle with a pencil or a crayon a happy face, a neutral face or a sad face on their survey sheets.

Arizona has more than its share of school districts using student or parent evaluations as part of the formal assessment of teachers. That may be because the state has a conservative yet innovative superintendent of public instruction and does not have strong teacher unions to oppose such activity. Districts in other states are far more tentative.

At the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy in Aurora, for instance, students are led into the cafeteria once a year to fill out reviews of their teachers, particularly those new to the school. If the surveys reveal problems, a teacher's supervisor may call him or her in for a meeting, but such incidents are rare. Steve Cordogan, coordinator of research and evaluation at the school, says the 14-year-old public boarding school "is in one of those best and the brightest situations in terms of faculty, and we haven't encountered a lot of negative comment."

At Bouton High School in Voorheesville, N.Y., near Albany, growing numbers of faculty members over the last five years have asked for student and parent comments and restructured their courses accordingly. Teacher evaluations are not involved, but some union leaders "are not happy that staff do this at all," says Alan McCartney, superintendent of Voorheesville Central Schools. "They think it may lead to us making everyone do it. So far we have let it grow on its own and those involved seem pleased."

Wider Participation

The same slow-and-easy approach characterizes the surveys going our to parents in the Ridgefield, Conn., school district this year. Teachers don't have to send them out if they don't want to and they will not become part of any formal evaluations. "But," says Superintendent Ralph Wallace, given the close attention suburban Connecticut parents always have given to their schools, "we are going to be judged by our parents whether we create the formal mechanism for it or not."

Anchorage, Alaska, has students in grades 3 to 12 evaluate their teachers. The school system sends forms to all parents asking them to do the same. The results are given to principals or other supervisors to share with teachers.

Manatt says the Anchorage school officials should have spent more time preparing parents for the program and sought a more representative sample of responses. "They just sent out a broad mailing to every parent and guardian, few of whom knew what was going on. Very few sent the forms back in," he said.

Fred P. Stofflet, executive director for curriculum and evaluation in the Anchorage district, says only about 20 percent of parents returned the forms, and most were either very critical or very complimentary. "It was the extremes," he says. "It was not a statistically valid sample." The district is still discussing how to fix that.

The evaluation experiments continue to move gingerly forward, trying to involve students and parents without causing too many hard feelings. In Overland Park, Kan., school board member K.O. Strohbehn and her son say they hope the teacher evaluations will continue and someday even be shared with the people who must decide if teachers keep their jobs.

"I am hopeful over the course of time that teachers will see that it is a positive thing," Strohbehn says, "but they still don't like the idea of it going to their principal."

Jay Mathews is an education writer with The Washington Post.