Pasadena Star-News

9/15/03

Teacher rating Web site buzzing

By Cindy Chang

ALHAMBRA -- When Tracey Chan needs to vent her frustration about a teacher she thinks has graded her unfairly, or who drones on endlessly without making eye contact, her audience is not limited to her own circle of friends.

Chan, a junior at Alhambra High School, can complain to a virtual community on a Web site called RateMyTeachers.com, where students from across the country anonymously post comments on their teachers and rate them on a five-point scale.

"I've posted stuff when teachers are mean and try to do things they shouldn't do. It's putting the word out, having an opinion, and having people actually look at it,'' said Chan, who in addition to dinging bad teachers also posts comments in praise of her favorites.

For high school students, who have limited discretion in choosing their classes, the site functions as more of an online bulletin board than a practical tool for seeking out or avoiding certain teachers. It is one small cog in the virtual universe that includes instant messaging networks and blogs'' -- online diaries -- and has become an indispensable part of life for the growing number of teenagers who have personal computers at home.

In school districts like Alhambra, where a majority of students surf the Internet from home computers, there are multiple postings for nearly all the high school teachers and many junior high teachers as well. But some local districts, including Alhambra and Temple City, are preventing students from accessing the site on school computers, either through their own discretion or because the filtering software they use automatically filters it out, raising First Amendment and equal access concerns among watchdog groups. A few teachers, uncomfortable with receiving grades rather than meting them out, have complained about the site to school administrators. But many teachers view the site with a mixture of amusement and humility, laughing at an especially outrageous comment but also using the site as a source of constructive criticism from students.

Gary Carnow, director of technology and information services for the Alhambra City and High School Districts, says his department blocked student access after a school administrator complained about the site.

"I think that if students want to go there, they should be able to go on home computers outside of school time. During the school day, it's disruptive,'' Carnow said. "There's no way of knowing who posted what. Because of the anonymous nature, it amounts to hearsay or gossip.''

Schools are required by law to have filtering mechanisms in place in order to receive federal funding for Internet technology. Like most districts, Alhambra hires a filtering company to block pornographic sites and other obviously unsuitable material. Alhambra has used its discretion to block additional sites only twice: once with RateMyTeachers.com and once with a site called martinlutherking.com that was actually a white supremacist site, Carnow said.

Schools can block students from accessing sites that do not have educational value, but they cannot single out one type of site while allowing other educationally irrelevant sites to remain, said Terry Francke, general counsel for the California First Amendment Coalition. Students also have the right to discuss controversial topics to the point of creating a "buzz'' around campus that distracts from schoolwork, as long as no major disruption results, Francke said. "Schools can't just shut down talk of controversial topics on grounds of relevance,'' Francke said. "Kids have to be able to talk about things that interest them.''

The RateMyTeachers Web site has a network of volunteer student administrators who remove postings that contain potentially offensive content or that seem to be from pranksters rather than students who actually took the class, said Nancy Davis, a co-owner of the site. Local students and teachers say that when taken as a whole, there is usually a grain of truth to the comments they read on the site -- even if there are some writers who express a grudge against a teacher merely because they got a bad grade in the class.

"Some kids, they think if a teacher's hard, they're bad, and they'll just give a bad rating. But most of (the ratings) are pretty accurate. With most of the bad ratings, the teachers are pretty bad,'' said Andrew Jacobs, a senior at Arcadia High School who occasionally accesses the site from his home computer.

Teachers say they usually have a sense of what students think about them without the aid of the site. But the sting of a specific comment can prompt a teacher to change his or her ways. "I hear resentment in some of the comments. But some of them are great,'' said Keane Misawa, who teaches Japanese at Arcadia High School. "They'll say things like, this teacher needs to be a little more organized. It's constructive criticism. Do I take it personally? No.''

"He gives you a good grade if he likes you. If he doesn't like you, you get an F,'' one student posting says of Misawa, who received a 3.8 overall rating out of 5 on the site. "He can be very hard at times, but you will learn a lot from him,'' says another.

The Arcadia Unified School District does not block access to the site from school computers. The technology department was asked by a teacher to look into potential problems with the site, but it is not the type of site, such as sexually explicit or gambling sites, that the district normally regulates, said Robert Leri, director of technology and information services for the district. "Unless it turned into something that was causing a disruption, I would not do anything to block it at this point,'' Leri said.

While some Alhambra students object to their district's ban on philosophical grounds, most say it has little practical effect. Those with computers usually access the site from home, and those who do not can easily log on at a public library. "I wouldn't put that much value on the site,'' said Derek Yee, a senior at Alhambra High School and co-editor of the student newspaper. "If they're that desperate, they can go to a friends' house or the library.''

But Davis, the site co-owner, says restrictions on in-school use deprive poorer students who do not have computers in their homes of an equal opportunity to air their views. "What that's doing is disenfranchising the students from economically disadvantaged areas. What it does is remove them from the equation,'' Davis said. "The postings are coming from students whose parents are affluent enough to afford computers.''