Mark Zuckerberg, fresh from his disastrous $100 million investment in Newark schools (The Best Posts & Articles For Learning About Newark’s $100 Million From Facebook) has decided he wants his own piece of the teacher evaluation business.

He’s just become a major (I assume, THE major) investor in an education start-up called Panorama that is promoting the use of student evaluations to evaluate teachers.

The New York Times has just published an article about them — Grading Teachers, With Data From Class.

As regular readers know, it’s unlikely to find another teacher more committed to student evaluations of teachers than me. I regularly have students do them and share online and with administrators and colleagues their results — warts and all. You can see them all at The Best Posts On Students Evaluating Classes (And Teachers).

In fact, The Washington Post reprinted one of the reports that shared even more warts than usual a year or two ago.

Regular readers also know that it would also be difficult to find another teacher who has stronger negative feelings than me about the idea of using student surveys as an element in a teacher evaluation.

My reasons are numerous, and you can read them in my previous posts on the topic, which you can also find on the previously mentioned “Best” list.

Ordinarily, I’d write a summary of my objections. However, today was the second day of the new school year, and I’m exhausted. It looks like it will be another great set of classes and students, but, as all teachers know, the first week of school is a killer until we get our “teacher legs” back 🙂

I’ll put a more extensive post on my “to do” list, but thought that — in light of today’s Times’ article — I wanted to get something out quickly….