For years now, standardized testing and teacher observation have been seen as the two key pillars to gauge student learning and teacher proficiency. A new survey company, Panorama Education, hopes that its improved and much cheaper survey techniques can ensure that a third pillar is added: student voice.
A New York Times article by Farhad Manjoo profiled the efforts of this surveying startup and found promising results. Following is an excerpt from the article:
Mr. Feuer, the co-founder of Panorama, became fascinated by student surveys when he was attending an urban high school in Los Angeles in which about half of incoming freshmen did not graduate. Mr. Feuer is a computer enthusiast with an appetite for data, so he naturally searched for numbers to explain his school’s low performance, but found few hard statistics. He became active in student government, eventually becoming president of the California Association of Student Councils. In that role, he persuaded California’s Legislature to pass a law that would encourage schools to solicit student feedback.
But after Mr. Feuer graduated from high school and began attending Yale, he realized that the law he’d helped push had gone nowhere. As useful as they were, student feedback surveys were too expensive and cumbersome for widespread adoption.
Instead, you need close monitoring and a large constellation of data to effectively assess their performance. In 2012, the pair decided to start a tech company devoted to making surveys more widely available for schools. The business proved immediately successful, with dozens of schools signing up to test the program.
It is too soon to tell how widely schools will adopt surveys like Panorama’s, and how deeply surveys might become integrated into the education-reform movement’s effort to find a better way to measure teachers. But some teachers and administrators, including those at Aspire Lionel Wilson in Oakland, say the surveys have been instrumental in how they approach the classroom.
With technology today, more and more schools can afford the technology to hear more from their students, but the question remains whether they will have the support and/or know-how to use those data in meaningful ways.
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