Grades. Love them or hate them, they are a big part of high school life. So naturally, a lot of people stress out over them. When a teacher decides not to update the gradebook until the day before its deadline or decides, actually, it’s more important to talk about their personal life for 30 minutes, it doesn’t help with students’ mental health. Students are subject to deadlines, and have to turn in homework on time, study for tests, all while trying to balance a social life. It’s not unreasonable for students to expect their teachers to do a good job in teaching and grading them in a timely manner. After all, they’re getting paid for this; students aren’t.
Why can’t teachers be graded for their performance? Current teachers in California experience a very stable job system. After the first two years, due to tenure, it is very hard to remove teachers from their jobs. This job security leads to many students always complaining about how terrible a teacher is year after year, but nothing is ever done about it. Instead, it’s just dismissed as students’ opinion, like “the class is too hard,” or “the teacher doesn’t teach well” or some minor issue like that. There are a few teachers and administrators at Milpitas High alone that have had several petitions made pushing for their removal, but nothing has ever been done.
There is some system in place for teacher evaluation at Milpitas High, but it is very opaque and hard to find information about. Plenty of higher education institutions, like UC Berkeley, have students complete course evaluation forms at the end of each course, giving anonymous feedback about what they liked about the course and what needs improvement. This sort of evaluation is never done at Milpitas High, and I believe that our school would benefit greatly from such a system.
Most of the teachers at Milpitas High are great and do well in engaging their students in learning. However, the select few who ruin whole subjects for students need to be incentivized to improve. A transparent evaluation system and student feedback would benefit the school, and create a better learning environment for everyone.