The Student Leadership Team (SLT) reconsidered a proposal at its last meeting on Tuesday, May 19 to implement a system of formal course evaluations after members of the Student Union (SU) found that course evaluations would not violate the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) contract. Requiring teachers to give students course evaluations at the end of every semester was brought up by the SU at an SLT meeting on Tuesday, April 21, but it was quickly dismissed.

“We made major headway at the last meeting,” SU vice president and junior Casey Griffin said. “At the first meeting, [UFT local chapter representative and social studies teacher Ellen] Schweitzer struck down the entire idea. Nowhere in the contract says [course evaluations] are not allowed.”

Schweitzer declined to comment.

In Issue 15 of The Spectator, we misstated that formal course evaluations were a violation of the UFT contract and quoted a section of the contract out of context. According to Prinicipal Stanley Teitel, a proposal to implement such a system would require approval by faculty members and the UFT local chapter representative.

“My sense is that the union will want no part of it,” Principal Stanley Teitel said. “If you’re asking a supervisor to read [a student’s evaluation], the union wouldn’t sell it.”

“Schweitzer said she had to be convinced that it would be a helpful idea,” Griffin said.

The UFT contract allows two methods of teacher observation and evaluation. According to the contract, the first model, called Annual Performance Options, “offers an individual teacher, in consultation with his/her supervisor, the opportunity to set yearly goals and objectives and to choose the methods for demonstrating professional growth.” This model would allow the inclusion of student input should the teacher and assistant principal agree to it.

The second model, called Formal Observations, is “the traditional classroom observation by a principal or supervisor which includes pre- and post-observation conferences and written feedback and comments.” The school currently uses this model to evaluate teachers’ performance, which would not include students’ evaluations.

At Bard High School Early College, a unionized school, students fill out course evaluations at the end of every semester. The teacher leaves the room, and students complete a survey asking them to rate the course on a scale of one to five, on aspects like whether the teacher was accessible and whether grading was fair. There are also specific open-ended questions like “What was one thing you will remember?” Teachers then review the evaluations with their supervisors.

“At our school, they are course evaluation forms, not teacher evaluation forms,” Bard junior and student president John Iselin wrote in an e-mail interview. “This is actually a big distinction, for a large problem is that the forms sometimes disintegrate into teacher-bashing.”

“It is something debated in our school,” Bard sophomore Emma Gerstenzang said. “There have been a lot of meetings and discussions with administrators.”

Bard is in the stages of remodeling its current evaluation system, either making evaluations department-specific or creating a different set of more focused questions to solve problems of vague questions.

“A couple of good points are that within all of the negativity, there is a lot of useful advice given,” Iselin wrote. “It also empowers the students and allows them a voice in their education.”

With about 150 students in each grade, Bard receives close to 3,600 evaluations every semester. Stuyvesant’s larger population could pose potential problems in a course evaluation system.

“My suggestion was—and it doesn’t involve assistant principals or publishing the evaluations in any way—that it be strictly between teacher and student,” Stuyvesant parent coordinator Harvey Blumm said. “Since some teachers are doing it on their own, my proposal was that each department would make their own evaluation and teachers could voluntarily hand them out and students could choose whether or not to hand them in.”

The SU will invite teachers who have conducted course evaluations in their classes to discuss the proposal at the next SLT meeting on Tuesday, June 9.