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Comment by argumentum | Hacker News Reader

You can factor in the opinions of parents, students, fellow teachers, admin, as well as test score improvements, college admissions etc.

I think you underestimate the ability of students & parents to judge teaching ability separately from likability. The users of a product are best suited to know what works & what doesn't.

At my high school we had a mix of good & bad, as you'd expect. Everyone knew which teachers knew their subject, could communicate well, was more dedicated etc. Some of the most engaging teachers were the least liked because they graded harder, but if you had a rubric that included "grades fairly", "not boring" etc, students would be able to correctly assess them.

Of course some would be dishonest, but noise will cancel itself out, by and large.

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> I think you underestimate the ability of students & parents to judge teaching ability separately from likability. The users of a product are best suited to know what works & what doesn't.

You significantly overestimate the goodwill of everybody involved.

I had a butch, lesbian English teacher. Most of the community had "issues". Students hated her because she was a ferocious grader. Without tenure, she would have been gone.

However, her results were amazing. If you took her AP English class and got a B or above, you were getting a 5 on the AP exam.

So, what counts? Community? Administration? Parents? Students? How do you square the fact that everybody wanted her gone, but her results were stellar?

They all count, as do test scores.

And there, we disagree.

She was extremely effective. Her students knew English and English Literature very well after her class. They tended to win writing awards as well as stomp the AP test flat. However, very few students and parents liked her (oddly, I did, but my father was an English teacher so I had already been brainwashed that English wasn't easy and to rewrite, rewrite, rewrite), and, consequently, neither did the administration as they had to deal with complaints.

She's clearly a domain expert and way more competent at teaching English than anybody judging her. Why do you think that the community at large has any competence to judge her as a teacher? Of course, many of her students were were much happier with her once they hit college and found that composition was easy, but, unfortunately, very few of them ever came back to the area.

The high-tech equivalent is allowing an HR person on your engineering interview loop (never do this, by the way). Since they can't judge them on engineering, they will wind up rejecting candidates based upon their handshake, their clothes, or a hundred other things completely irrelevant to being an engineer.

Well you could add in alumni then. All I'm saying is that measuring performance is not that hard a thing to do.

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