What Can Parents Tell Us About Teacher Quality? Examining the Contributions of Parent Perspectives in Comparison to a Portfolio of Alternative Teacher Evaluation Measures

• In Event: Unpacking Value-Added Measures of Teacher Performance: Implications for Disadvantaged Students and the Parents and Teachers Who Support Them

Abstract

Parent perspectives of their children’s K-12 teachers have received increased attention in recent years as a potential performance measure for use in teacher evaluation systems. However, relatively little research has explored the types of information that parents can provide about individual teachers, or the extent to which their perspectives provide distinct information in comparison to other teacher evaluation measures. I examine parent perspectives of teachers alongside a rich portfolio of alternative teacher evaluation measures including student surveys, formal lesson observations, and value-added measures of teachers’ student achievement gains.

I specifically examine the following research questions:

1. To what extent do parent perspectives of teachers provide meaningful differentiation between teachers, both within and across schools?
2. Do parent perspectives of teachers represent a stable attribute of teachers that is consistent across different school years and classrooms of students?
3. To what extent do parent perspectives align with other teacher evaluation measures such as student surveys, lesson observations, and teachers’ value-added performance?
4. What specific questions or dimensions from student surveys or lesson observations are more or less closely aligned with parent perspectives?

This study uses longitudinal data on parent, student, observational, and value-added ratings of teachers in a public charter school network that serves more than 5,000 predominantly poor and minority students in grades K-12. Parent and student surveys were collected about more than 400 teachers and over multiple school years, and address a range of perceived teacher contributions and characteristics. Multiple formal classroom observations of each teacher in each year provide additional information, and are scored using an instrument that provides details on diverse dimensions of teachers’ practice, from administrators’ perspectives.

I first expand upon prior research about parent ratings of teachers by examining the stability of teachers’ parent-ratings over time and across multiple classrooms, as well as the implications of using within-school versus across-school relative parent ratings of individual teachers. I then assess the alignment between the parent measures and alternative measures in both the same and future school years. I consider alignment both overall and in the various specific dimensions measured by each of the alternative instruments (e.g student survey questions, classroom observation dimension ratings). I also investigate the same and future-year alignment between parent ratings of teachers and value-added for teachers in grades 4-8 in Reading and Math.

I find that parent perspectives offer a distinct and stable teacher performance measure over time, but one that appears fairly one-dimensional. They are most closely aligned with student perspectives, but are also associated with specific components from formal lesson observation ratings, including teachers’ success in fostering a positive classroom environment and encouraging student engagement. Parent perspectives are also predictive of teachers’ math value- added performance in the same school year. The results suggest that parents can offer an informed and potentially valuable perspective about their children’s teachers.

Author

• Benjamin Master, Stanford University