Should Students Be Able to Grade Their Teachers?; a Question Born of Privilege

  Between the bustling hallways, looming assignments, getting shoved or shoving to get to your locker; school is stressful. However, the most stressful of all is opening your grades, and waiting for them to load, wondering if you’re good enough, or if your parents are going to be disappointed, or if you should give up on your dream career. Grades are honestly quite horrifying, especially with how fluctuating and uncertain they can often be. With that being said, students should not be able to grade their teachers.

First of all, us students know better than anyone how painful and identity-shattering grades can be, so why should we want to inflict that upon others? Sure, you could say “if they’re a good teacher they have no reason to stress”, but that’s untrue. That would be like saying “If you just pay attention in class, you’ll be fine”, which remains untrue for plenty of students, especially those who have trouble focusing potentially due to issues in their life or factors outside of their control (such as being neurodivergent). According to Mental Health America, 8% of adults, and 15% of teens, in the US, suffer depression. We never know what’s going on in other’s lives, and of course that doesn’t mean we should say that everyone’s objectively as good at certain things as everyone else, but for a student to have a bad subject, or a bad semester, or a bad grade, it doesn’t cost as much. In college admissions, grades can be important, but if someone has a reason as to why they got said grade, they can explain said reason to the college, especially if it’s a life altering reason. Otherwise, teachers can grant extensions, or help, or if they’re a bad teacher (most people cannot learn from them), students and parents typically get mad, and speak with higher ups. Although one might say a bad grade could cost their future, or dream college, as heartbreaking as that is, it’s so uncertain, and essentially losing something you never had to begin with. Also, students can recover, or ask for help (if they’re lucky enough to have the resources), but essentially, they have other opportunities to evolve and change as a person. Students might have college, grad school, jobs that they can go to, and their grades won’t matter. However, for a teacher, being labeled as a bad teacher could potentially get them fired, or make it harder to get jobs in the future. Teachers are already incredibly underpaid as is, so being graded poorly could cost their insurance, or their next meal. Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but is true in many cases, especially if they have others to support and are their sole source of income.

Lastly, us teenagers literally do not have the mental capacity for grading teachers. I don’t mean this in a hurtful way, because I do believe teenagers can be mature, but, according to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, teenagers, compared to adults, tend not to “pause to consider the consequences of their actions”. So, a teenager could very easily cost the future of a teacher, simply for a petty revenge, or without second thought. Although there are bad teachers out there, in situations in which grading teachers would actually lead to action, people typically already have the resources they need to the point that parents would probably already get upset with the administration. 

Essentially, if a teenager’s words are enough to impact a school’s decision, that’s a case in which the school has other hiring options, or in which parents/adults around them could already act. It’s not about the means with which the message gets shared, nor the substance of the message, it’s about the resources people have. It’s about the actual choices people could make, not how they come to them. 

Citations:

“Depression.” Mental Health America, https://mhanational.org/conditions/depression#:~:text=Basic%20Facts%20About%20Depression,are%20affected%20by%20major%20depression.

“Teen Brain: Behavior, Problem Solving, and Decision Making.”  the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, September 2017, https://www.aacap.org/aacap/families_and_youth/facts_for_families/fff-guide/the-teen-brain-behavior-problem-solving-and-decision-making-095.aspx.