Wow. I am NOT buying this, not even a little bit. I am a Dean at a large community college in the State of Washington, and I review the student surveys (yes, they are SURVEYS, not evaluations) for nearly 100 teachers. At the same time, I have visited the classes of most of those teachers and evaluated their teaching ability, and the level of learning that appears to be taking place. I can tell you that, in my experience, there is a strong correlation between student survey ratings of teachers and classroom learning.
Sometimes, it is hard to quantify ‘learning’, because grades alone do not necessarily directly translate to learning. However, in our Math Department, we tracked student grade performance in the class taken AFTER each specific teacher’s previous class. This allowed us to make an informed judgement as to how well-prepared a student was by a particular teacher, to perform well in the class that depended on learning from the previous class. Not surprisingly, our highest student-rated teachers had students who performed the best in their next class.
To be sure, there are some fun and engaging teachers that garner high student survey ratings despite the fact that their coursework is not that rigorous. And, to be sure, some students give higher ratings to teachers who are deemed ‘easier’. However, it is the extraordinarily rare teacher who has poor student survey ratings, yet his/her students learned a great deal. And, likewise, it is the extraordinarily rare teacher who has strong student survey ratings, yet his/her students did not learn much.
In any event, no competent academic supervisor solely uses student surveys when they evaluate the performance of a teacher. Any good evaluation is based on a series of data points, only one of which constitutes information from student surveys.