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To be honest, I'm not sure how teachers get and keep their jobs, but as students are graded on their studying skills, I feel like teachers should be graded every fews years on their teaching skills.

Well, to be honest, I really wish everyone who wants to one more hurdle in front of teachers should understand the correlation between bad teaching and teachers having a low-paid, unrewarding and effectively abusive job.

Lousy teachers keep their job because no one highly competent wants these jobs. Lousy teachers keep their job because a huge array of bureaucratic song-and-dance exists and people good at that can be bad at teaching.

I'm sorry you had that experience but you might consider looking at the system. Corporate customer support is terrible, let's all call for more test-of-competence for these low paid flunkies too. That will address the problem.

True - stricter performance evaluations aren't going to solve problems caused by a poor hiring pool.

Poor hiring pool and work mistreatment, that actively prevents teachers from teaching well, while simultaneously piling lots of bullshit work on them.

Hey, this sounds like exactly why I'm working on moving out of (secondary) teaching. I didn't mind the pay, being single on a low CoL area and the benefits were good... But the bullshit is killing me, as is the lack of respect from parents in a highly anti-intellectual county (I never realized how bad it was until I returned as a teacher) who demand that Little Johnny pass when he just wants to play Fortnite all class period and never turn in work.

There is something to what you are saying but it is also true that many many aspiring teachers wash out because they can't even get their first job after getting their teaching degree. It _is_ a competitive market in many places but the market _isn't_ functioning as it should because of dysfunctional relationships with unions and tenure.

It _is_ a competitive market in many places but the market _isn't_ functioning as it should because of dysfunctional relationships with unions and tenure.

Unions? Really? Not administrators and profit institutions cutting college teachers' salaries to the bone, creating a situation adjunct professors literally starve to death in the process. No, unions. And tenure is your other complaint? The job guarantee that no longer applies to most college teachers today. Why not complain that the average teach still is able to sleep at night and has roof over their head?

Okay then.

Unions have their flaws but it was that way well before the current disastrous regime.

And sure, teaching is competitive market because even with all the horrors, lots of people want to teach because it's something to believe in, in this horrible and the bureaucracy, that unions are at best a junior partner in, do make it hard.

Are you talking universities or K12? Because everything the parent said is true in K12. Spend 10 minutes at a Jersey City School Board meeting and you’ll see just how aggressive the union is if you even hint at reform. Can’t speak to higher ed though, except tenure for classroom instructors is a real problem. Since they have absolutely zero incentive to be good teachers but instead only engaging in activities that bring in research money for their area of interest.

The OP is about college teaching and what I've written is applicable to that. Folks seem to have segued to K12 for some anti-union speechifying in the meantime.

As far as that goes, look at the condition of teachers in Kentucky if you think unions are the problem.

Unions have a fairly inflexible response to most "reform" plans but the problem is most reform plans, as can be seen here, aim to make teacher more insecure, more constrained, more "flexible" but without compensation for that flexibility. Sure, LA, Oakland or New Jersey might look bad but compared to strongholds of non-union teaching, they are paradise.

It would be great to come up with a reform plan that empowered teachers. The unions might fight that but individual teachers probably wouldn't. But the kinds of reform that come often from people lips - more testing and less job security, are rightly resisted by both unions and individual teachers.

Yup. If a reform plan included things like "let's actually pay teachers more", "let's give them more freedom to apply good teaching practices", "let's give them saner working hours" and "let's reduce the red-tape a bit", I doubt any union would complain.

Not really.

It’s a very cyclical market as cohorts of graduates coming out of school wax and wane due to birth rates and the economy. All government or teaching jobs are that way — their fiscal woes lag the economy and they tend to pick up better employees when companies blow up.

Blaming unions like citing the boogeyman. It’s almost always the lazy answer that doesn’t pan out.

I didn't dismiss other variables so flippantly as you are doing and I never blamed unions, I said "dysfunctional relationship". I'm a big defender of unions actually but that doesn't mean they are perfect.

> as students are graded on their studying skills, I feel like teachers should be graded every fews years on their teaching skills

If a teacher grades a student poorly, there can be repercussions. They have an incentive to grade fairly and accurately. The same isn't true of students, who can grade on feelings and grudges.

Teachers are also subject matter experts in the material being graded. Students aren't trained as educators, so why would they be any good at evaluating their teachers?

Student evaluations lack even the smallest part of the rigor that they should contain. They are practically worthless.

> If a teacher grades a student poorly, there can be repercussions.

Yes, but the above poster was talking about TEACHING poorly. It is easy enough to expect students to know things at the end of class, but harder to be of use in them learning that material.

> Teachers are also subject matter experts in the material being graded.

Some are. Maybe even most. But definitely not a universally true statement, particularly in areas where teacher pay is dramatically out of line with industry wages.

> Students aren't trained as educators, so why would they be any good at evaluating their teachers?

Fair point. But as pointed out by others, there are few other forms of evaluation/accountability. And while a student may not be able to identify WHY they struggled to learn, they can certainly evaluate IF they did. If many students agree, that's a problem best addressed quickly.

I teach a university class (just one, my day job is coding) and I've been utterly amazed at the lack of accountability applied to me and my peers. Meanwhile I have friends that teach teens, and the bureaucracy and policies they must follow seem just as bad, but in the opposite direction.

If you have a good alternative to student evaluations, please share, otherwise I'll agree with the flaws you listed but still find them better to have than not.

>> Teachers are also subject matter experts in the material being graded.

> Some are. Maybe even most. But definitely not a universally true statement, particularly in areas where teacher pay is dramatically out of line with industry wages.

So you say that if we find out which teachers are incompetent and actually kick them out, we would need to raise teacher wages to the point of being competitive with the industry?

Sounds like a win-win to me.

Students are the only people who can really evaluate the quality of teaching. Someone with a pre-existing understanding of the material cannot tell whether the class can successfully communicate it to a fresh mind.

A few negative evaluations based on personal disputes can be expected. If there are grudges or strong feelings among a large enough proportion of students to meaningfully influence the aggregates, then something really is wrong.

If other teachers prepared the tests from a shared curriculum for the students, and grading would be by the book (the book would be a living document amended as edge cases arise), then teaching performance could be assessed via the test scores.

I have seen this work well for the end of highschool test (prepared every half year), participated on the mailing list purely as an observer (where teachers discussed edge cases - and there was/is a process to get official guidance from the test writer group, but not directly, so that provides a bit of blinding against biases).

As long as we try to let teachers cope by themselves (and maybe give them a few TAs in higher ed), and don't make their work testable, we're bound to have wild theories fueled by anecdata.

They should be a data point. We had a professor let go due to the student evals, and that was a good thing for the university. I can see where the article and op are coming from as a former educator, but there does need to be a feedback loop.

The story on our professor. She could not communicate ideas well and proceedures worse. This was a second or third year accounting class. She would present some procedure on calculating some complex set of ratios. Students would be confused and ask for clarification on where different values came from (they seemed to originate from nowhere). She would pause. Look sideways at us. And ask I'd we new how to add and subtract, shake her head, ignore the questions, and move on. Evaluations we're the lever that students had to help correct the system.

I absolutely agree, however a separate issue is that most teachers (at the College level) also aren't trained as educators.

UK: when I was involved with teacher training at a local university, I had to act as placement tutor for around 15 training teachers - all graduates with good UK first degrees in a range of subjects. I had to observe each of the training teachers half a dozen times, and that process included checking the planning of their lessons (before the lesson!), providing feedback on the lesson itself and identifying issues to work on for the next lesson. Each training teacher had a placement mentor as well whose classes the training teacher taught under supervision initially. I was also responsible for supporting the placement mentor in the mentoring role.

Everything got recorded in an online system - the training teachers did their reflective writing &c and I read their blog posts (private blogs!) and tried to support. Managers at the University (relevant ones) could access the blogs and help out with any more serious issues. I had direct contact with the mentors as well in case they had issues to discuss.

Probably the hardest teaching job I did in a 30 year career. But almost all of the training teachers are working in local colleges and schools.

A big issue with education in the UK is that university lecturers generally get zero teacher training. Consequently, teaching quality at undergraduate level is widely variable.

Teacher training is subject to OFSTED every two years (or was) and so things are pretty tight. Teaching standards in general undergraduate courses are being slowly pulled up - but I know what you mean.

> I feel like teachers should be graded every fews years on their teaching skills.

They are, or at least used to be. At least at high schools in Poland, teachers would get occasional visits from higher ups who observed their lessons and would give them feedback.