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Listening to Feedback
 Using student feedback to customize future instruction is nothing new, but consider the advantages of making it public. The primary reason for the popularity of online teacher rating sites is, obviously, students' natural desire to vent their frustrations or counter such comments with praise. In other words, teacher rating sites serve as the Web's wonderful uses and gratifications theory in action.
Now, the site's operators might argue that the true reason for their creation is for students to best choose teachers when it comes time for scheduling – an argument provided by the operator's sister site, RateMyProfessors.com. The problem is this point is moot at the secondary school level since many American secondary schools lack the level of autonomy students receive when attending a college or university. Speaking of which, while most places of higher education conduct teacher evaluations at the end of a course, the results of these evaluations, to my knowledge, are not made available to students; here's where the feeling of instant gratification comes from with public websites assessing educators.
Personally, I love getting student feedback and I often will collect it, even informally, as a means of transitioning from one unit of study toward the next. Having students anonymously write comments and feedback either on an index card or posting to your personal blog/website can help you tailor future instruction for that specific audience. Whether you're going to heed their "advice" or not, you'll be giving students the feeling of actually having some kind of say in not only how you teach, but how their class activities and studies may unfold as the course continues.
A Catch-22 for the Anonymous Post
Without a doubt, the guys running these sites must continually face serious credibility challenges from anyone able to see the forest for the trees. Credibility is the tip of the anonymity iceberg when it comes to digital communication, and while I obviously do not wish for students' names and information to be published online, I do think there needs to be criteria established in order to make something like these rating sites valuable. And we're not just talking about these specific sites.
Considering other similar websites related to assessing teachers and school districts such as GreatSchools, SchoolDigger, or SchoolMatters, are mostly contributed to by parents, shouldn't we funnel our efforts for online assessment into a source that gives the user an honest result of a teacher or school? Perhaps schools could elect to create their own version of a site like these through an intranet service, thereby allowing students similar criteria for assessing their teachers anonymously but with proof of enrollment in a particular teacher's class.
We can continue contributing to sites like those mentioned here, but will it change the way educators conduct self-assessment? While I occupy my time developing real, face-to-face interactions with teenagers who are hopefully gutsy enough to tell me to slow down with the literary elements used by lesser known authors, I'll also keep hoping for someone to develop a teacher rating site that's actually helpful and not just a means for either overly vindictive or overly approbative students to profess their feelings for the world to see.
References:
PBS Teachers: https://www.pbs.org/teachers/learning.now/2006/08/educatorranking_websitesthe_st.html
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Re: A Failing Grade for Online Assessment? (Part 2)
