Can Student Surveys Measure Teaching Quality?

Primary and secondary school students spend hundreds more hours in each classroom than any observer ever will. But, until now, school improvement efforts have seldom sought systematic student feedback at the classroom level. One impediment has been the doubt that students can provide valid and reliable responses about the quality of the teaching that they experience. Now comes an initiative from the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) Project of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that has determined that well-crafted student surveys can play an important role in evaluating teacher effectiveness.