Marchitect and Hopping
'What I can tell you is at one of our daughters schools parents were unhappy about one teacher. The parents grouped together with their complaints. Within a month not only was the teacher removed but a new permanent teacher in place. This is reflective of the awareness private schools have of the business they opperate within, i suspect a state school would not react in quite the same way.'
'It was more about a lack of discipline leading to a few incidents in class, very little homework being set, even less marked and the dc in that class becoming very disengaged in that subject
When parents pay directly for education they can and do complain loudly when they don’t feel they are getting what they pay for. I don’t think the teacher was exactly marched off the premises but it was suggested she was more suited to HE or Academia than teaching 11-16 year olds'
These two posts illustrate the fact that parents know exactly how a teacher should teach (generally, because they feel that they know schools as they went to one). No one will admit (even to themselves) to being 'that parent' that teachers dread, but they do exist and, I would say, constitute around 15% of private school parents.
How many people would decide that a doctor at a hospital was not working out as they disagreed on the drug regime to their previous doctor (or to what they had looked up on the internet)? I suspect not that many.
I am not saying that parents and pupils should not have a voice. Often, they are the canary in the coal mine who alert the SMT/SLT to a bad teacher. However, in both the above examples, it sounds like the schools weakly capitulated to a group of hectoring parents without giving a potentially excellent teacher the chance to improve.
It is also the case that parents think they know what they want from a school but often don't. In addition different teachers suit different pupils. I have seen very well educated teachers struggle with a rowdy Year 9 but give inspirational A level classes to Oxbridge candidates.
Generally parents have relatively few points of reference as to how good a teacher is: what their children tell them, the homework and marking and grades. They thus (on average) tend to like teachers with perfectly controlled classes who give out a lot of handouts and prep.
They are totally unaware of different teaching styles and, in fact, how little difference homework actually makes (research has shown it to be of zero benefit at primary and slightly positive benefit even at secondary, far lower than many other educational interventions). A well controlled classroom, again, is important, but a classroom where you can hear a pin drop is not always the most beneficial to long term effective learning.
Finally, there is often a compromise between teaching for the best grade and the best teaching in terms of genuine subject knowledge. Grades (up to GCSE) are gained, for all but the strongest candidates, by checklists (how to answer a 3 mark calculation question, the marking points for writing up an experiment etc). It is an open question as to whether parents would favour better grades over a better general education or vice versa. There are advantages to both.
In conclusion, although I do think that feedback from pupils and parents is important in assessing teaching, it is merely one input in how teachers should be judged. Fast and easy learning is not necessarily high quality learning but it is the type that most parents like the most.