Someone is proposing a Yelp for teachers

My husband sent me an article this morning he found on Yahoo, written by Matt Bai on Politics. You may read it here:

A Yelp for teachers If the schools won’t make metrics public, maybe the public should make some metrics of its own

He proposes a public rating system similar to Yelp, that parents can use to rate teachers. The article is lengthy, and I do understand where he is coming from. Not all teachers are the same, and parents have a right to know that. However, for the most part, parents do not have a good understanding of what teachers do. Yes we teach their children, but as the comments to the article point out, we are not miracle workers and there are SO many factors to take into consideration when deciding whether a teacher is "good" or not. Plus, teaching is maybe half of what we do. The other half is disaggregating data, planning lessons, grading papers, creating activities, receiving training (if you're in a good district that actually provides training...), etc.

You can't expect teachers to work miracles if they have not been properly trained in miracle working (ie: how do you teach a class of 25 fourth graders to write a narrative on a fourth grade level when five of them are on a first grade reading level, fifteen of them are on a high second grade reading level, and five of them are above a fourth grade level...and you have no help from anyone.)

Everyone is quick to judge everyone else, and everyone has their own excuses for their shortcomings, etc. but rushing to quick judgement is not going to motivate anyone to do better.