What do groundbreaking technological applications and subpar, dilapidated restaurants have in common?
Their success depends on the satisfaction of the customers they service.
Both reviews and ratings have become an integral societal staple and shape the way that many consumers make decisions about almost every aspect of their lives.
But what’s interesting is that they also generate a more enlightened society.
By leaving a review, others can learn from and act in accordance with the knowledge of their peers’ past experiences. This practice stands to combat the selfish mentality of the globalizing capitalist system that perpetuates the gains of having an uninformed consumer.
In the Consumer Bill of Rights, first proposed by John F. Kennedy in a 1962 speech to the US Congress, the right to be informed about paid goods and services was a prominent ideal and the world was overtly quick to agree with this notion.
This can be exhibited in the ease of rating Uber drivers, stores or even teenage babysitters, but can’t be seen in one of the most imperative entities in the entire world – the public school system.
All of this rate and review freedom just emphasizes the question of why the public school system does not receive the same feedback about their employees as other businesses and organizations do. Teaching is one of the most important jobs on Earth, as they educate the future leaders of the world, and it is known that an inadequate teacher can negatively affect a student’s interest in a subject or even school as a whole.
Public schools are funded by taxpayers, so essentially they are payed by the consumers. They should know the quality of the service their family is receiving through the release of collective ratings and reviews for their teachers even if they can’t change it immediately.
This option is already readily available to college students who are able to go onto sites like ratemyteacher.com to find information about their professor. Yet, in K-12, there is no mechanism, at least in Broward County, to parallel that of the college level one.
Rating/grading teachers based on their performance could also factor into their pay. While their whole salary should not be based on the opinions of children, a bonus to particularly favorable teachers would suffice in incentivizing respectable teaching methods.
Overall, students being able to grade their teachers could become a normal practice if implemented in the public school system, as ratings and reviews are already a prominent concept in today’s world. It would facilitate a greater quality of learning for all students and promote a more open forum that would greatly improve the communication between student, teacher, parent and employer.
Photo courtesy of RateMyProfessor
