Should Student Surveys Be Used to Evaluate Teacher Performance?

Should student surveys be used to evaluate teacher performance?
The issue of evaluation of teachers’ performance has been a bureaucratic issue for many decades. It has been a field that has failed to recognize the mediocrity or excellence that is found in the profession of teaching. This means that there has been a situation whereby teachers’ performance evaluation has been a missed opportunity for providing feedback that could help teachers in improving on whatever they do in class (Berk 49). This has brought about the issue of including student surveys in the list of methods that can be used to assess and measure the performance of teachers (Chambers et al. 5). The process entails the application of the views of students on their individual teachers, which is followed by an assessment of the feedback to show whether teachers are performing as per the expectations of educational stakeholders.
According to Ferguson (3), “The students know.” This affirms the thesis statement for this paper that students surveys should and can be used to measure or evaluate the performance of teachers. This can either be at present or in the future. For many decades, it has been found that school inspectors only go to the classroom setting several times in a year, and this is not sufficient time to ensure that they have got feedback that can be used to improve the field of education (Chambers et al. 6). Thus, it means that their assessment on the performance of teachers is based on issues that they have observed over a short period, as opposed to a longer time in order to come up with improvements that are accurate.
Students spend most of their time interacting and associating directly with teachers. This gives them the chance to look at the performance of the teachers and perform an evaluation that will contribute greatly to the measurement of teacher’s performance (Stronge 14). Student surveys can be used as a means or a measure to for the effectiveness of teachers in quality evaluation and support system (Berk 57). At the same time, student surveys can be used to provide valuable and actionable feedback to teachers and other authorities that are concerned with the welfare of teachers. This will in turn assist in providing an improvement on student’s experiences that they go through in the classroom. The information from students is first hand and unbiased, in most cases, and this should be used as an advantage.
Another reason that shows student surveys as proper ways of performance evaluation is that the surveys assist school leaders to design or come up with professional development. The effective surveys give the school heads additional data that inform professional development and also improve instruction in schools. The student feedback can be used to plan and also design a systematic developmental plan for teachers (Chambers et al. 5). Additionally, the surveys are reliable and also valid measures of evaluation to the assessment of the manner in which teachers perform. This is because most of the times, students can recognize the effectiveness of teaching once they have experienced it (Berk 49). The survey results are usually a prediction of the future of students’ achievement and success in academic matters. For instance, students who learn more in one school year are likely to rate their teacher higher in performance as opposed to those that learn less.
Student surveys should be used to evaluate the performance of teachers due to the fact that they improve the accuracy of the evaluation systems that are already in place (Darling-Hammond 1). The process of combining data that has been collected from student growth, surveys and observation usually come up with a reliability strategy that will work well to measure performance once it has been implemented. Student surveys also predict the growth of students over time and this has been amplified whenever the data from these surveys are combined with observations as well as value added data.
The surveys show that students’ judgments are correlated with their test scores. This means that based by the scores that individual students get, they can be able to state whether the teacher is effective in class or not (Chambers et al. 5). Thus, there would be a situation whereby the surveys points out at where a certain teacher is weak or strong and present a chance for improvement. The surveys can also be sued to show where teachers have managed to keep on top of the teaching career and where the rest for the faculty members have failed to score a point (Berk 61). This shows that student surveys can be sued as tools that diagnoses and improves the quality of education in a school.
Student surveys have come across as one of the best methods of evaluating the performance of teachers that have been greatly overlooked. They deserve a glimpse closer than that has been taken for many years in schools (Darling-Hammond 1). It is imperative to note that there are various schools that have been implementing the surveys with assistance from teachers and school heads in a manner that ensures that there has not been any drain of resources that are sometimes scarce. The system of student survey has also proved to be important in the sense that there are schools that are field testing surveys that can be used for only developmental purposes.
In conclusion, student surveys should be used in every teacher evaluation and support system. This is because they have a track record of overcoming obstacles that come about with the assessment of the manner in which teachers carry on their work. It is a method that has payoffs in the teacher development and evaluation rating accuracy. It is a way of creating a feedback loop that is important in strengthening evaluation systems and also improving teachers’ practice. In the long run, there will exist benefits in learning and the authorities will have a found and easy and a cheap way of ensuring that they got reliable information worth for the evaluation process.
Student surveys have a high potential to improve various instructional practices through providing teachers with feedback on the areas that need improvement. Though they may sometimes affect the relationship between teachers and students, the benefits are far more than the negative impacts. There should be recommendations that should be taken into consideration in order to ensure that there ar no unintended results. Firstly, there should be no over relying on student surveys as a mode of performance assessment. Instead, there should be the use of a simple combination of various reliable measures that can be used to come up with similar results. There should be a certain percentage that has been set for this method in order to give the other methods an opportunity to be used.

Annotated Bibliography
Berk, Ronald. “Survey of 12 strategies to measure teaching effectiveness.” International
Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education 17.1 (2005): 48-62.
This article first appeared in the International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. The aim of the journal is to handle educational matters and researches related to various issues. Berk’s article focuses on a survey of the 12 strategies that should be used to measure the effectiveness of teaching in the classroom setting. It offers an insight on the potential sources of evidence that is used to measure effectiveness of teaching and also critically reviews them. Berk proposes a unified conceptualization of teaching effectiveness that has been proposed to ensure that the effectiveness of the teaching profession has been properly evaluated.
Chambers, et al. “How Much are Districts Spending to Implement Teacher Evaluation
Systems?” American Institutes for Research, 2013.
The authors have offered an insight on amount of resources that are used by districts in an attempt to implement the evaluation systems of teachers. They have presented case studies of the efforts that have been used by three schools to launch, implement and also operate new teacher evaluation system. This is in line to implementing a reform effort that is referred to as Partnership Sites to Empower Effective Teaching. The authors argue that the systems that are involved in such a process include student surveys as well as student classroom observation components.
Darling-Hammond, Linda. “Teacher quality and student achievement.” Education policy analysis
archives 8 (2000): 1.
Darling-Hammond provides a focus on the effects of the quality of a teacher in relation to the performance of a student. The author uses data that has been obtained from a survey from 50 states as well as staffing surveys. The findings that have been found out in the study show that policy investments in teacher quality are directly related to improvements in the performance of students. The author suggests that the policies that have been adopted by the states in the process of evaluating teachers might be used to see the difference that exists between qualified and under qualified teachers.
Stronge, James. Evaluating teaching: A guide to current thinking and best practice. Corwin
Press, 2005.
Stronge has presented a guide that can be used to understand the current thinking and best practices in teacher evaluation. The author states that there are several methods that should be used specifically for teacher evaluation, in order to determine whether they are remarkable in class or not. This leads to the recommendation of student survey as one way to assess the performance of teachers. The author also states that student surveys should be taken as one of the most accurate methods of teacher evaluation due to the fact that students are not as biased as other methods.

Works Cited
Berk, Ronald A. “Survey of 12 strategies to measure teaching effectiveness.” International
Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education 17.1 (2005): 48-62.
Chambers, J., et al. (2013, May), “How Much are Districts Spending to Implement Teacher
Evaluation Systems?” American Institutes for Research.
Darling-Hammond, Linda. “Teacher quality and student achievement.” Education policy analysis
archives 8 (2000): 1.
Stronge, James H. Evaluating teaching: A guide to current thinking and best practice. Corwin
Press, 2005.