Teacher quality in elementary education: Examining the validity of parents' perspectives through classroom observations

Society today is concerned with producing and maintaining high quality teachers. The defining characteristics of 'good teachers' are many and varied depending on who is critiquing them, administrators, education professors, students, or parents. Although often overlooked in education-based research, parents may be particularly influential in children's school experiences. Formal evaluations of teacher quality, including awards, licensure/certification, and education standards are often used to evaluate teachers; however, only one study has provided an insight into the elements that parents consider essential in a quality educator (Doyle & McIntyre, 2008). In order to encourage parent involvement in educational systems, it is appropriate that parents' perspectives not only be examined, but also validated. The primary goal of this study was to assess parents' perspectives of teacher quality through use of the Parent Evaluation of Teachers rating scale (Doyle & McIntyre, 2008) and investigate the relationship between these ratings and standardized classroom quality scores as measured by the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS; Pianta, La Paro, Hamre, 2008). Results suggest that the PET scale produced adequate internal consistency reliability (alpha = .95); however, parent perspectives did not correlate with the three aspects of quality classrooms defined by the CLASS. These findings indicate that parent perspectives of teacher quality may not be related to standardized observations of classroom quality, including the classroom emotional support, classroom organization, and instructional support, perhaps suggesting that parents evaluate teachers based on different criteria.