There was an earlier Hacker News submission about the Gates Foundation research on teacher effectiveness,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4559682

linking to an article that reported details of the methodology.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/10/why-kids...

I looked up other research on the matter for the reply I posted in that thread. From the article submitted then, this is one way this process has been validated:

"The responses did indeed help predict which classes would have the most test-score improvement at the end of the year. In math, for example, the teachers rated most highly by students delivered the equivalent of about six more months of learning than teachers with the lowest ratings. (By comparison, teachers who get a master’s degree—one of the few ways to earn a pay raise in most schools —delivered about one more month of learning per year than teachers without one.)

. . . .

"The survey did not ask Do you like your teacher? Is your teacher nice? This wasn’t a popularity contest. The survey mostly asked questions about what students saw, day in and day out.

"Of the 36 items included in the Gates Foundation study, the five that most correlated with student learning were very straightforward:

1. Students in this class treat the teacher with respect.

2. My classmates behave the way my teacher wants them to.

3. Our class stays busy and doesn’t waste time.

4. In this class, we learn a lot almost every day.

5. In this class, we learn to correct our mistakes."

Here is earlier reporting (10 December 2010) from the New York Times about the same issue:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/11/education/11education.html

Here is the website of Ronald Ferguson's research project at Harvard:

http://tripodproject.wpengine.com/about/our-team/

And here are some links about the project from the National Center for Teacher Effectiveness:

http://www.gse.harvard.edu/ncte/news/NCTE_Conference_Using_S...

Simply put, don't assume that what the Gates Foundation was investigating was the same kind of student opinion survey that I have filled out as a postsecondary student. (But note that I'm not so sure that those surveys are as bad or as useless as college faculty often claim they are.) There is a research base for the primary school pupil and secondary school student ratings used in the Gates Foundation studies, and I have every reason to believe those ratings would help school effectiveness--so much so that I use the same questions to invite my clients of my mathematics program to evaluate my teaching from that point of view.

Other comments in this thread are about the more general issue of college rankings as they currently exist. As a parent who has occasion to look at my children's college search process for four children, I really like the site College Results

http://www.collegeresults.org/search1b.aspx?institutionid=11...

which aggregates data that colleges are required by law to report to the federal government into user-friendly data look-ups that allow direct comparisons of similar colleges along many dimensions. For me as a parent, one of the most interesting data views is a view of "comparable colleges" for a college of interest, sorted under the Finance and Faculty tab for a ranking of colleges by instructional expenditures / FTE (full-time equivalent students). That comparison often reveals that even the "scholarships" (discounts from list price) that colleges offer still leave parents spending far more for their children's higher education than the college itself actually spends on educating students. That's a raw deal that more parents ought to know about. Colleges hire expensive consultants to learn how to confuse parents on the issue of value,

http://www.maguireassoc.com/services-challenges/optimize-net...

and parents have to defend themselves by looking up comparable data.