The Online Edge
Students Rating Teachers Online
Today's students can share their evaluations
worldwide
A federal judge
recently ordered New Jersey's Oceanport School District to pay
$117,500 to a student who was punished two years ago for
creating a Web site criticizing his middle school teachers.
Even though it was created on personal time using a home
computer, school officials were angered by comments posted in
the site guest book. The student was suspended for a week,
benched from playing on the baseball team for a month and
barred from a class trip. "The district never explained to us
what rule or policy our son violated," says the boy's father,
and the court ruled that Oceanport administrators violated the
student's right to free speech.
Grayson Barber, who handled the case on behalf of the
American Civil Liberties Union, says the district presented no
evidence that the comments "threatened or disrupted school
activities"--a crucial test in judging legality. Related cases
in other states have had similar outcomes, and the Supreme
Court ruled that public school students "do not shed their
constitutional right to freedom of speech or expression at the
schoolhouse gate."
The explosive development of online communications
technologies--including e-mail, instant messages, bulletin
boards, forums, wiki sites and blogs--puts enormous grassroots
power into the hands of users that reaches around the world.
Students will naturally use these vehicles to share opinions
on topics that affect their lives, including teachers and
schools, and comments will be negative as well as positive.
While school quality is commonly defined by various factors,
including per-pupil expenditures and class size, students
almost never get to evaluate their educational experiences.
Thanks to the Internet, those voices are now being heard.
Rating Teachers Online
College students have long had opportunities to evaluate
the quality of their instructors through Web sites such as
Rate My Professors, Professor Performance--regrettably also
known as MyProfessorSucks.com--and specialized sites such as
Rate VT Teachers for Virginia Tech. But now the concept is
exploding in K-12 education. For example, RateMyTeachers.com
has compiled 8 million evaluations on more than a million
teachers from 50,000 schools that probably include some in
your district.
RateMyTeachers lets students rank teachers on a scale of 1
to 5 on easiness, helpfulness and clarity, and displays the
results with an overall score and smiling or frowning face for
each individual. In addition, students can add comments that
are screened to exclude those that are potentially libelous,
sexually explicit, profane or unrelated to teaching. Readers
can also flag comments they feel are inappropriate for further
review, though even scathing comments are allowed to stay if
they relate to the classroom. Site co-founder Michael Hussey
says about 60 percent of the evaluations are positive, but
also says, "I think we encouraged a few teachers to
retire."
Evaluation Controversies
Unfortunately, most site administrators have no way to tell
if teacher evaluations were done by students, colleagues or
even the teachers themselves, and they cannot control the
number of times that individual ratings are submitted. Still,
many educators feel that student feedback is a potent source
of information that districts can use to help improve teaching
and identify strong and weak teachers. At the same time others
feel the evaluations are usually popularity contests and witch
hunts by disgruntled students. Either way, the online
evaluation of teachers is here to stay, so check your school
ratings and see how students feel about their classes.
Odvard Egil Dyrli, dyrli@uconn.edu, is senior
editor and emeritus professor of education at the University
of Connecticut.
