How secure is your job?

A decent school understands that student evaluations must be taken with a grain of salt. Students often retaliate for a bad grade or for a school policy they don't like, etc. by attacking a specific teacher who had to enforce the policy or deliver the bad grade. School administrators know that and take that into consideration when they interpret that information.

However, I do sometimes feel an unpleasant pressure to "please the customer" in my part time school faculty role. It's something that is a part of the environment, inherent in the nature of the work that educators do. At the end of the semester, there will be written evaluations from your students that you will have to face. While your supervisor may be totally reasonable in her intrepretation of those student evals, you still have to face them -- and be prepared to justify the decisions you made. That's very different from hospital nursing in which you don't receive a written eval from each patient (and family) you care for.

This is a good topic to bring up during an interview for an educator position. Ask how those evals are used and ask what other performance evaluation measures are used to assess faculty performance. I'm sure it varies a bit from school to school.