Students Rating Teachers Is Idiocy
Daniel J. Daly
Omaha World - Herald (3/26/00)
The writer is retired. He was chairman of the English Department at Omaha Central High School
Having all but the best of today's college students evaluates their instructors, especially after years of hearing how special they are and of having their self-esteem nurtured, is the height of idiocy. Allowing those who should be subject to rigorous instruction and to the low marks that should accompany unsuccessful performance evaluate their teachers is like relying upon only the criminal lawyers to evaluate the county prosecutor. Paul Trout (March 19 More Commentary) has it right, of course, but his perception has limitations born of his reluctance to identify the ultimate source of the problem.
It didn't start in college, and it's not a novel phenomenon. During the past two decades, however, more and more parents have sided with their children against the academic and disciplinary authority of their teachers, thereby undermining the essence of academic life, which is its magisterium, its heart, its pedagogical authority.
Grading practices that are reluctant to identify a student's failure or his refusal to master essential skills and subject matter infest the schools. Social promotion, passing the child along with his age-mates, may have apologists who can defend their position for the lower elementary grades, where teachers have characteristically helped slower learners catch up with their peers. But when a student's failure to master academic skills doesn't justify moving him along to the next grade, parents often exercise an authority that schools have recognized, overruling the teacher who wishes to fail a student for the year.
Parents retain this curious authority during the middle school years. Some students actually move from the middle school to the high school without enough credits to be ninth-graders. Even those high schools known for excellent programs cannot hide behind their vaunted reputations on this issue, because, for the most part, they reserve their rigor for the honors program.
Even in the honors programs that most high schools offer to students with high achievement or high aspirations, the public will tolerate just so much rigor. It is not at all unusual for the parents to object when their children finally get the grades they actually deserve for their performance - C's and D's instead of A's and B's that some of them were getting in middle school.
Don’t blame those middle school teachers whose administration has already cut the academic rigor out of their curricula and told them, in effect, that they cannot fail anyone. And don't blame the high school teacher whose positive annual appraisal reflects not only the small number of students who failed but also the small number of students who earned D's. Under the success-rate scenario, an average grade is not a B.
Please not, Midlanders, that the education profession has been indoctrinating teachers of academic subjects with permissive and gutless programs and movements such as "Schools Without Failure," " Project Empathy," "cooperative learning" and "outcome-based instruction" for more than three decades. Despite theses efforts, however, many teachers of core academic subjects have resisted their efforts by ignoring what has been a continuing effort by departments of curriculum and learning to water down academic rigor and justify their own existence. But the inroads they have been making across the country have created the phenomenon Professor Trout outlines and the kinds of students who fill out the evaluation forms.
What else can you expect from students who enter the university after 12 years of this excuse for an academic regime? We have no one to blame but ourselves and the system that we have allowed to trickle up to Professor Trout and his colleagues. Our system has infected theses students with the idea that they have the expertise, the authority and the power of judicious scrutiny to appraise their instructors. Most college instructors would probably welcome an evaluation process that included a ratings grid and comments from serious and thoughtful students, but what university today would allow an instructor to identify those students and eliminate the disinterested, the vengeful and the academically stunted?
