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To what end, though? Let’s say that every parent of every child that i teach gets to voice their opinion. What would this serve? Should these opinions be instrumental in my job evaluation? Based on what criteria?</p>
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<p>To the same ends applicable to every government employee. There are formal avenues for filing complaints against police officers, there are ombudsman offices in many branches of government. The encounters and complaints and opinions should become part of the public employee’s file and used as part of the job evaluation. As far as I am aware, however, in our school district there is no mechanism to do this with respect to teachers unless the complaint involves potential unlawful activity, presumably due to union contract limitations.</p>
<p>EPTR: No, the parents are first generation (with immigrant parents). The students are 2nd generation.</p>
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Gluckie: You’ve got that right! Every single parent complainant I’ve ever dealt with could have been easily mollified if I gave the student a higher grade!</p>
<p>It all depends on how you define “work for”</p>
<p>In the most direct sense you work for whomever is issuing your paychecks. I work for a publicly-traded company in private industry. </p>
<p>The way I see my own situation is:
- I work for the company.
- My work is supervised by my boss
- I serve the company’s paying customers
- I’m accountable to the shareholders - the owners of the company. But I’m accountable to them collectively and not as individuals, since no one shareholder owns a controlling interest.</p>
<p>So for a public school teacher the same construction would be:</p>
<ol>
<li>You work for the school district</li>
<li>Your work is supervised by the principal</li>
<li>You serve your students</li>
<li> You are accountable to the taxpayers (collectively)</li>
</ol>
<p>Why just teachers? Maybe the Navy Seals work for you as well. Don’t like your noisy neighbor, call your ‘employees’ to solve the problem.</p>
<p>Let me preface this by saying I am not a teacher. And in reality my children have had a handfull of less than stellar teachers. I understand that frustration as a parent. BUT How can a parent realistically evaluate a teacher – parents are not in the classroom getting a first hand account of what is happening in the classroom? Parents get a second hand impression of what is happening as seen through the lens of their child’s impressions or the rumor mill or “something untangible”. This isn’t to say that a parent can’t figure out when things are not going “right for their child” but it is not necessarily the teacher that is the problem. Might be the teacher but could be plenty of other things too. Evaluations need to be based on neutral first hand data. Recently read some article which talked about having cameras in classrooms so administrators could view teachers under regular, real time circumstances when they are unaware they are being watched and not just rely upon the impression the administrator gets of performance when the teacher knows they are being observed.</p>
<p>Just the nature of the job makes it so that, yes, there is some “working for the parents”. Also working for the community, the school rep, the students, the union, the whole concept of education, the country…the list goes on. </p>
<p>I always thank the teachers for helping us raise our kids because once they are in school, they do spend a lot of their waking time under the teacher’s watch.</p>
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<p>That is part of the problem, as I see it. Too much subjectivity to be helpful in an evaluative way. I do agree, even as a teacher, that supervisors should be more present, unannounced, in the classroom to see what really goes on. It is very frustrating, as a parent, to know that a teacher is not performing and yet, they are there year after year after year.</p>
<p>It’s not just parents who pay tax for the school system. In fact, most of taxpayers are NOT parents if you think about it. Depending on how many kids one has, people have their kids in public school system for about 12 to 15(?) years while we pay tax as long as we live for about 50 years. You could say roughly speaking two thirds of tax payers are not parents. There goes working for parent tax payers argument. </p>
<p>I think parents should be kept out as much as possible except at a young age. We are not an impartial observer.</p>
<p>A high school principal in a nearby city has implemented am exit evaluation done by graduating seniors on the teachers they have had (both academically and as club sponsors). IMO this is a good source of information for the principal and a good way for the student to be heard without any backlash. A less mature student could abuse this process, but the school is likely aware of these students already and would not put much stock in those students’ evaluations. I think it would be a useful resource for any prinncipal as he can’t be everywhere all the time. This just provides extra info to the principal…it isn’t used as a basis for firing, raises, etc. I give this principal a lot of credit for caring enough about his students and teachers to create more work for himself. :)</p>
<p>in the broader, more ideal perspective I’d answer the OP with a definite YES. In that context, I’d remind any teacher they have chosen to be a public servant. I would assume their career calling is to serve the public. In this case, to serve the public by educating their children. “The government” really isn’t their employer. The citizens are their employer. The terms and conditions of their employment may change, just as it may change for someone employed in the private sector.</p>
<p>However, in the real and practical world, though citizens are the employer, it means all citizens of the district, not just one parent. No one parent has the right to micromanage his employee, the teacher.</p>
<p>In the private sector, my boss may or may not make the decisions I would choose, but he’s still my boss.</p>
<p>This is an interesting question! I have seen this from all sides- parent, teacher, student. There is no easy answer. IMO teachers do not work directly for the parent/taxpayer. However, by virtue of the nature of the job, the teacher does have an obligation to be responsive to the parent. That being said, I know of no way to address a bad teacher in the system. I have refrained in the past from expressing dissatisfaction to the school system because my kid(s) have years to go in the system and it doesnt pay to **** teachers off. The system can be unfair to all involved. The kids have no power and a bad teacher can be abusive without repercussions. On the same token, teachers have to take a lot of unwarranted harassment from over reactive parents. Unfortunately, a lot of teachers get tired of fielding parent calls and become dismissive of all parent calls. (Sigh, there are good/bad teachers and good/bad parents).</p>
<p>I know that not every teacher complaint from my kid is valid, but I dont hesitate to ask questions and advocate for my kid. As a parent that is my job. As a teacher, my job is to be responsive to those questions without being vindictive. It has nothing to do with where the paycheck comes from. Interacting with parents in a positive way is part of successful teaching. </p>
<p>As a parent, I have to say that I ignore most of my kids teacher complaints. Kids are under tremendous stress and of course they are going to b**** about life. However, when my kid tells me that the teacher is always in a bad mood and he is afraid to ask questions because of it…thats a problem. Unfortunately, it isnt the kind of problem that a parent can do anything about. In fact, contacting this kind of teacher is only going to make the situation worse. </p>
<p>Some teachers love teaching and it shows in everything they do. Our kids thrive with these teachers. Some teachers seem to dislike kids, teaching and everything involved. These teachers can scar our kids for years. I know of no evaluation system that properly tells the difference. Ideally, parents should have a voice. But, unfortunately, sometimes the parents with the least valid opinions have the loudest voices and conversely, the parents with valid complaints keep silent to protect their kid from retribution. Its not a perfect world.</p>
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<p>I agree with this with emphasis on public. Serving the public and serving parents are not one and the same. Parents are hugely invested in their own kids’ interest in a way that may not serve the public. Parents should serve a resource role but not someone teachers should report to. What would you do with pushy patrents demanding A’s for thier kids?</p>
<h1>32 Nice post.</h1>
<p>One thing to keep in mind is that our children are minors under the law until they are 18, which means that we are responsible for their actions and we have a responsibility to protect them and advocate for them. Children should not be expected to be responsible for reporting misbehavior by their teachers, it is the parents job to do this on behalf of their children.</p>
<p>If some people are saying that parents should stay out of it because the teachers do not “work” for them, then who is it that should be speaking up when a teacher is not performing or is behaving badly?</p>
<p>Oh my. What a question the OP poses.</p>
<p>Do they work for the parents? No. </p>
<p>Should they work for the parents (and all tax payers)? Yes.</p>
<p>Who do they actually work for? In my opinion we ultimately always “work for” who provides our paycheck. While it’s true that public teachers are paid by tax payers, their paychecks, benefits and lifelong job security is negotiated and provided to them by the NEA. </p>
<p>They work for their union because that is their true “payer”. </p>
<p>I would also argue that they work to implement a curriculum that enforces and promulgates the political perspective that supports them – and that is largely lodged in the education departments of our universities. </p>
<p>Right now their is (finally!) attention to the quality of teaching. Next up, I hope, will be a critical look at the curriculum in our public schools.</p>
<p>There is really no more critical and urgent issue in front of us than improving education in this country. It’s good to see the burgeoning interest in fixing it.</p>
<p>@Bay - Parents, I guess, as resource. Sure there are bad teachers who should be reined in. We also have bad parents. Selfish pushy ones whose sole intent is putting their kids out in front for everything? Their little Johny doesn’t get a main role in school play? Their Susie doesn’t get the sought after goalie position? The coach should be fired? Drama director incompetent? Parents are so emotionally invested in their kids that we can be very blind. Unfortunately, I am far more comforatble with bad teachers than overly passionate parents dictating kids’ education.</p>
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This is easy, especially after you get past elementary school: all the kids in the school know which teachers are good–they also know which ones are “easy,” “hard,” and “mean.” In my experience, the common knowledge among the students about this is usually correct. I think the school administration generally knows this as well. In the rare occasions when we had a complaint about a teacher, it was pretty clear we weren’t the only ones.</p>
<p>This is a great topic for discussion!</p>
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<li> I think public school teachers (and their unions) have to get used to the fact that they are public employees consuming a very, very visible portion of their community’s taxes. They have to expect to be publicly accountable. The structure of most union contracts has been to shield teachers from accountability, and that is unacceptable now and isn’t going to get more acceptable in the foreseeable future. That doesn’t mean that it’s suddenly easy to know how to evaluate teachers, and how they should be held accountable, but they should be actively looking for ways of proving their value rather than resisting the notion of being scrutinized.</li>
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<p>Of course, that’s working for the taxpayers, not the parents, and it’s also working through mediating structures.</p>
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<li> For us, going from middle school to high school, at that point at a fancy private school, was a big shock. In middle school, the teachers and administrators had treated parents as partners. There was lots of communication, problems were identified early, the solutions involved clear roles for everyone, including parents. In high school, there was little or no communication, and parents were treated as the people responsible for screwing up otherwise perfect students. We would call our kid’s counselor, and say, “There’s a problem,” and she would say, “No there isn’t.” Then, of course, eight weeks later she discovered that yes, there was a problem, and it was much tougher to fix than it would have been two months before, and she still wasn’t interested in hearing from us at all. And the teachers? Forget about it. Not their job. For the most part, these were excellent, excellent teachers, by the way. They just didn’t feel like they had to deal with parents. That didn’t go down well with us.</li>
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<p>We moved our kids to a public school, for that and other reasons. The public school teachers were more a mixed bag, and the school was much more bureaucratic. “No” and “Because” were pretty common answers. But the teachers and administrators had a personal commitment to the kids’ success, and they were mostly happy to work with parents who (while being respectful of the teacher) wanted to be involved.</p>
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<li> A terrible public school horror story, though. For one kid, one class, one grading period, someone apparently stole the teacher’s grading book, and the teacher gave everyone in the class Cs (with no explanation, until later). This was not only my kid’s only C; it was his only non-A-range grade his first 2-1/2 years of high school. Going into the end of the course, he had been teetering in the B+ - A- range; obviously, he had been hoping for an A-, while understanding that a B+ would not be unjust. This was a part-year course in an area that had always been problematic for him; it wasn’t surprising at all that this would be his lowest grade, although he had worked very hard to do the best he could, and I was proud of him for that. He felt horrible about the C.</li>
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<p>We had always discouraged our kids from disputing grades, but this seemed really wanton. He actually had all of his homework and tests, with grades and comments, so there wasn’t any issue of not being able to reconstruct how he had done in the class. We encouraged him to talk to the teacher, which he did, and got completely brushed off. It would have ended there, but a month or so later I told this story to an administrator at the school in the middle of talking about something else, and he said he would look into it. He called me back a few days later, and said that the teacher had changed Cs to Bs for any student whose parent had called the teacher to complain, but had not done anything for students like my son because no parent complained.</p>
<p>Now that’s really, really inappropriate!</p>
<p>JHS - your point #2 is really interesting to me because it’s pretty much the opposite of our own experience. We moved our kids from public to a “fancy” private for high school and found that the private school teachers were far more responsive to our children, and that because our interests were essentially the welfare of our children, we didn’t have to advocate for them – they were at that point in the hands of educators whose incentives were perfectly aligned with giving our kids the best possible education. </p>
<p>The whole need to be my kids’ advocate seemed to evaporate once they moved to private school. </p>
<p>Agree that the attention to improving teacher quality is important. Would argue that just as important, if not more important, is attention to improving the curriculum in the public schools. Math and science were okay. Language arts and the social sciences? Ridiculous. At least in our area.</p>
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<p>I don’t doubt you have experienced this, but as an argument against holding teachers responsible for bad performance, I think it is a worthless one. We should all be thankful for parents who are deeply involved in their childrens educations, whether we approve of their pushiness or not.</p>