Should Governors Submit to Anonymous Student Evaluation-Style Reviews by Legislators?

The student evaluation has been a staple in education since the 1960s.  Good way to get rid of unpopular faculty.  After all, if students are unhappy, then how can they be in a mindset to learn?  The same goes with “customers” wherever you find them.

      This is how it works:  students fill out anonymous evaluation forms to grade faculty who wait outside the classroom while their “fate” is being determined.  Typically, discipline-enforcing faculty receive low scores, along with those who don’t inflate grades–or who make courses rigorous and demanding.

      These scores are right on top of the administrator’s desk when the faculty go in for their annual evaluation.  If students don’t like you, then how can the revenue machine move forward?  Unhappy customers.  Time to find someone who “commands respect.”

      Faculty today are thus caught in a pincer movement from bottom-up and top-down.  Impotency seems the order of the day.  No longer able to assume that content knowledge is what energizes the classroom–the historical model–they are left to pedagogy as the only option, as if “how to teach” is a one-size-fits-all panacea to deal with unprepared and unmotivated students.

       Might the anonymous student evaluation be similarly employed to weed out governors who legislators find unpopular or ineffective?  Maybe governors could attend conferences that teach them how to glad-hand, schmooze, and motivate the legislative cats they’re trying to herd.

     To be sure, a motivated and loving legislature is better than a back-biting one.  Isn’t it best to get rid of governors that can’t successfully win over the majority of lawmakers?  Then, again, is it that much different for faculty?