What I think about the website ratemyteachers.com
If anybody believes that the Rate My Teachers website provides in any way an accurate and reliable gauge of teacher ability and effectiveness, they are extremely ignorant. The website advertises itself as ÒHonest essential critiqueÓ. Rate My Teachers is not ÒhonestÓ. Conversations with colleagues and students, and observation of the site have shown it to be laden with fake comments, fake teachers (complete with fake comments), and even fake schools (complete with fake teachers and fake comments). Furthermore, Rate My Teachers allows anyone to post comments, not just students, so positive comments about a teacher may well have been posted by their Mum, and negative comments may well have been posted by a bitter ex-partner.
Rate My Teachers is certainly not ÒessentialÓ. Teachers manage an increasingly difficult workload for a mediocre salary, in an environment required to be open and transparent to the public community. They are well qualified professionals who have chosen an occupation founded on providing young people with opportunity. Teachers deserve to be trusted and appreciated, and do not require criticism from outside their field. The proprietor(s) of the Rate My Teachers website have chosen a soft target for criticism, and in keeping with this cowardice, manage their website anonymously.
Rate My Teachers cannot be considered as ÒcritiqueÓ. Everybody has the right to express their opinions publicly, but very little credibility should be given to unfounded opinions. To gain employment as a teacher an extensive background of tertiary education is required, in the fields of study to be taught, and also in the fields of teaching and learning specifically. Beyond this, numerous professional competencies are required to have been demonstrated, and ongoing Òprofessional developmentÓ needs to be maintained. Teenagers are legally required to attend school, and cannot legally vote, drive, gamble, or drink alcohol. While teenagers are developing as adults, these legalities exist because generally (broadly speaking) their maturity in most (not all) cases is not yet at a stage where they can always make decisions based on whatÕs best for themselves. Teachers mostly have great respect for teenagers (shown by the fact that they choose to work with them), but the opinions of most teenagers on professionally qualified adults arenÕt strongly founded, and hence cannot be granted much credibility. The vast majority of comments posted by students on the Rate My Teachers website seem to relate mostly to whether teachers are simply liked or disliked, rather than to why or how teachers are good or not so good at their jobs. Comments that do relate directly to teaching ability are usually only superficial in their explanation.
Moreover, my fundamental issue with the Rate My Teachers website is that it contains a page specifically about me, with content over which I have very little control. I have never given permission for the publication of the page, so itÕs completely unauthorised. While this is not illegal, it is obviously highly questionable from an ethical perspective, and especially without my permission, greatly disrespectful, regardless of the positive or negative nature of its content. My main response to it is the page you are now viewing.
At best, the Rate My Teachers website is an amusing novelty. At worst, it significantly adds to the burden of public scrutiny already endured by teachers, and consequently has an extensively adverse affect on education as a whole.
If the Rate My Teachers website wishes to provide the educational community with a constructive service, it could do so much more usefully by perhaps being structured like a MySpace for teachers. In this way, teachers may choose to have or to not have a personal page about them on the site. If they do choose to have a page, they would then be in near complete control of the content (as anyone should be with a web page thatÕs about them), and thereby be motivated to use their page for productive educational purposes. This type of website would not only enable a channel of communication for educational conversation with students, but could also inspire professional dialogue between teachers of varying or similar locations, styles and subject areas. The ability of students to post comments and provide feedback could remain in essentially the same form, and teachers could respond more efficiently to comments they consider to be most relevant and decide for themselves which comments are appropriate and useful to be visible on their personal page.
Written by Nicholas Hender, July 2007.