Tobias Escher at the OII

In a recent post about the legality of rating sites such as RateMyTeachers and PatientOpinion I concluded:

“Last but not least, the subject under public scrutiny does matter as professors might well be made to face personal criticism in their role as public figures while teachers and nurses might have to be treated differently.”

Well, I might have been wrong. A couple of weeks ago the Regional Court of Cologne has decided that teachers too have to tolerate to be rated online by their pupils. In the case a German teacher had sued spickmich.de, a site similar to the British RateMyTeachers, that allows pupils to mark their teachers in nine different categories such as fairness of grades, quality of the lessons and difficulty of exams. So far more than 150.000 kids have used this service (according to the publishers).

The court made two important rulings: First, the ratings of the pupils are clear value judgements and are acceptable under the principles of freedom of expression as long as these are not defamatory. The court has given a lot of freedom and even allows polemic statements as the criticism of the pupils has the necessary relevance (after all, they are talking about people they meet and work with every day) and the evaluation of the school and its teachers is of general interest. Second, the judges did not follow the argument of the claimant that displaying her name next to the rating would constitute a violation of her privacy. They argue that this is information that could be easily obtained from the school’s website.

While this is an important ruling in favour of collaborative group judgements (something my colleague Malte Ziewitz is working on) there are a number of particularities about spickmich.de that merit highlighting to assess the ruling properly. First, there is a need to register on the site. The ratings are not publicly available and pupils have to register on the site in order to rate their teachers. Another difference to other rating sites is that the service does not allow for personal comments about teachers but only for grades between one and six (like the German grading system) in different categories. Finally, looking at the screenshots of the site it seems that what spickmich.de is really after is to establish a new social networking site for pupils that piggybacks on teacher ratings to reach a critical mass. It is telling that spickmich.de refers to itself as a pupil’s network.

Bottom line: I think this has been a good ruling in general as collaborative efforts with general interest goals should be encouraged and not stifled by the law as long as they do not harm anyone. Still I am slightly worried. The creators of the site do not get tired to emphasize that overall marks received by the teachers are rather good (average of 2.9) and that the site is intended to collect fair and objective judgements in order to improve education. But despite their arguably good intentions it remains the secret of the creators of the site how to reach a “fair and objective” judgement in categories such as sexy (or ugly), cool and funny (or embarrassing and boring) or easy (or difficult) exams.

While the association of German teachers made the predictable outcry about this effort one should make no mistakes: the role of teachers is difficult, public demand on them is high while appreciation of their work is low and although for years German teachers have been paid much better wages than their British counterparts, burn out syndroms are common, contributing to the German situation in which only 5% of teachers do actually work until there legal pension age. I yet have to see a fancy Web 2.0 application that would give teachers something in their hands to cope with their everyday work. Are there any social networking sites for teachers?