Students Know Teachers; Ratings on Site Are Bogus

Re “Controversial Website Lets Students Grade Teachers,” Jan. 7: What a great idea to have the students, who are the consumers of the services that teachers deliver, evaluate the teachers. There is nothing wrong with that. Who cares what an administrator thinks? The students know who is good and who is not.

The students express their views of a teacher, and if they preface everything they say with “in my opinion,” the bad teachers who cannot stand the truth being told about them will have a heck of a time attacking the website in court.

Long live the 1st Amendment!

Mathew Kundinger

Pasadena

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I just logged on to the site www.ratemyteachers.com.

Congratulations, Mr. Calder, of Los Alisos Intermediate School. I just rated you 5.0! I don’t know you and have been out of school for 40 years, but thought anyone teaching physical education to seventh-graders definitely needed a happy face. In fact, since there’s no screening on this dumb website I’m giving 5s to every teacher in the district. Don’t know them; doesn’t matter; accuracy not required.

Fortunately for educators Nancy and Tim Davis, two of the ill-advised founders of this site, I couldn’t find their names or schools in order to rate them. Convenient.

A form of “constructive criticism”? Hogwash! Soliciting anonymous input from virtually anyone with Internet access, including vindictive and failing students as well as nonstudents, and then publishing the results, not to the teacher or principal but for all the world to read, is only intended to generate advertising profits.

Publicly humiliating a teacher with bogus ratings accomplishes nothing. Legitimate comments from students submitted to the principal would get the job done nicely but, alas, no revenue here. Let’s hope that a large libel settlement will put this site where it belongs -- in the recycle bin.

Gary Harrington

Mission Viejo