Ask the classroom experts

Forget all the hand-wringing and head-scratching over the issue of teacher evaluation. Maybe we should just ask the children.

Because early results from the $45-million “Measures of Effective Teaching” project suggest that students’ perceptions of their instructors are about as accurate as test score growth in distinguishing good teachers from bad.

“The students know,” said Harvard researcher Ronald Ferguson. “They know when the class is orderly, the teacher explains things clearly, pushes them, keeps them busy.”

What they may not know — because we didn’t — is that those factors relate directly to how much those students are learning.

Ferguson helped develop the surveys used in the study to assess so-called classroom engagement measures. Separately, researchers used the value-added method to estimate each teacher’s effectiveness by comparing student test scores over time.

When researchers compared the students’ evaluations with their teachers’ value-added scores, they found that the most successful teachers had a few qualities in common, which their students readily identified.

They were good at classroom management — students were busy, orderly and respectful. And they were good at clarifying complicated concepts, because they used different ways to make the same point.

“There are different dimensions of effectiveness,” Ferguson explained. “And kids can tell you which dimensions their teacher meets: ‘This teacher is really good at explaining things, but she’s boring. This one seems like he really cares about his subject. This one pushes us to keep busy.’ There’s a fair amount of agreement among the kids in any given class.”

Now researchers have to figure out how to get that knowledge into teachers’ heads.

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Ferguson is an economist but has spent most of his career studying education. He and I grew up a few miles apart in the same working-class, mostly-black neighborhood in Cleveland.

He graduated a few years ahead of me and went on to earn degrees from Cornell and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has taught at Harvard since 1983 and heads its Achievement Gap Initiative aimed at remedying academic inequities.

I asked if there were any teachers at our school who would fit the raising achievement ideal.

He thought for a moment and came up with Stuart Telecky, a prim, soft-spoken English teacher with a patient, formal style.

It’s the same name I would have offered if asked. Mr. Telecky used no games or gimmicks. His class wasn’t fun. But he ushered us through Henry James and Edith Wharton and Herman Melville; he gave their arcane stories meaning in our urban lives.

He assigned too much homework and graded too hard. I once stayed up all night to retype a 30-page paper, because I’d spotted a few mistakes that Mr. Telecky wouldn’t stand for. Even the tough guys who rumbled in the hall played the scholar role when they came through his door.

I don’t believe it’s coincidence that the economist and the journalist both credit the same teacher for pushing us toward success.

Effective teachers have common strengths that go beyond some sort of interpersonal magic. And if we ask the right questions and listen to their students, we might learn more about what those strengths are.

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I can hear the naysayers now: Kids want it easy. What do they know? They’ll like any teacher who’s nice to them, lets the homework slide, puts on a show.

But what do we, the grownups, know? What makes an effective teacher these days is a mystery that has only just begun to be studied systematically.

Teachers unions would have us believe it’s seniority. District hiring offices bank on advanced college degrees. Principals look for someone who will fit in with their faculties.

So why shouldn’t student opinions matter?

Ferguson said the value-added ratings and student surveys will be made available to the 3,000 teachers being studied in this national project. The question is, will they read them?

“I would like the student perceptions to be something that teachers look forward to having,” he said. “They want us to survey their classrooms, they want to know what their students think.”

But in 10 years working on school reform with districts across the country, Ferguson found fewer than one in three teachers have been curious enough to check out their students’ assessment sheets. “We make it possible for them to get confidential reports of students’ responses,” he said. “All they need to do is reach out and ask for it. But only one-third or fewer ever follow the procedure to get it.

“I think they’re afraid to know sometimes,” Ferguson said. “I think people don’t want to take the ego hit. I can tell you from personal experience, opening up those class evaluations is a moment you have to prepare yourself for: ‘Are they going to slam me, say I’m a terrible instructor?’ ”

Ferguson knows the feeling because college professors are evaluated every year by the students they teach. And those ratings — many of them public — influence who gets tenure, the best pick of classes and paycheck-boosting enhancements.

Maybe teachers ignore these student comments because there’s nothing resting on them. “They’re low stakes,” Ferguson said. “They don’t have any consequences.”

He understands that teachers don’t want to risk a public airing of their shortcomings. “One teacher had the idea that we give them a couple of times to look at their evaluations privately, without anybody else seeing the results. They want to see it without anybody looking over their shoulder. Then they would have a chance to make the adjustments.”

But the change train is too far down the track to ignore what we know about student perceptions. And it’s too late to worry about teacher egos.

“I think students’ evaluations ought to be made public in schools,” Ferguson said. “Teachers ought to have no choice and ought to be forced to look at that.”

sandy.banks@latimes.com