Do Students Know What Makes a Good Teacher? The Role of Student Evaluations....

According to the NAEP, or the National Assessment of Educational Progress, 37% of fourth graders in the United States are unable to read at the basic level. Results from a 2009 study by PISA, or the Programme for International Student Assessment, place the United States at seventeenth in the world in literacy, twenty-third in science, and thirtieth in math. The American education system is falling behind its worldly counterparts and letting down the most vulnerable of its students. In an attempt to stop this landslide in its tracks, many programs have been implemented to measure and diagnose problems occurring in public schools. One such program is the MET, or “Measures of Effective Teaching” Project, sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The project seeks to identify methods and attributes of successful classrooms to better educate students. The MET Project is the first of its kind to investigate the role of student evaluations of teacher effectiveness, and shows great promise in its ability to reinforce the findings of more objective measures, such as the value-added system. However, the MET Project only measured perceptions of elementary and middle school students. This study aims to prove that if elementary and middle school students are able to recognize an effective teacher, there is no doubt that high school students can do the same with even more precision.