LA Times' coverage of the teacher suicide precipitated by their publication of teacher ratings

[Hannah Bell]

A few lines. Nowhere do they mention their part in it.



Teacher's body found in Angeles National Forest

A Southern California elementary school teacher missing for a week has been found dead at the bottom of a bridge in the Angeles National Forest.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department said in a news release that a search-and-rescue team was on training exercises Sunday near Big Tujunga Canyon when they found an abandoned vehicle connected to 39-year-old Rigoberto Ruelas.

Ruelas was a teacher at Miramonte Elementary School in South Gate. He had arranged to have a substitute teacher Monday and Tuesday, but didn't show up for work Wednesday.

Los Angeles County coroner's officials reached by phone said they have not determined a cause of death.

-- Associated Press

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/09/teachers-body-found-in-angeles-national-forest.html


Just some unimportant collateral damage in the way of capital's drive for increased profits.

[proud2BlibKansan]

1. They are complicit

Bastards.

[NYC_SKP]

2. As very tragic as this story is, one can not make an argument for causation.

Substance abuse, chronic depression, emotional disturbances, any number of factors or combination thereof may be associated with this terrible death.

I don't think we'll ever know if teacher ratings played a large role, a small role, or no role at all in this event.

:patriot:

[YvonneCa]

4. Watch this and see what you...

...think:

http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/story?section=news/local/los_angeles&id=7689560

[EFerrari]

7. And "thereof" is the wish of the LATimes, not to mention, that grifter Arne Duncan.

His family seems to be very clear that he was experiencing a lot of stress at work. But, what do they know, they're only his family. :eyes:

[Nikki Stone1]

16. I guess the washing machine is set on the

spin cycle.

[Hannah Bell]

21. just another mentally unstable loner, i'm sure.

[Nikki Stone1]

3. The LA Times has blood on its hands.

And they know it.

They just don't care.

[Starry Messenger]

5. They have done active harm.

This is so heartbreaking. I hate that they even mentioned his name. His family will see that, and the paper's inhuman and depersonalizing flat little mention. It's sickening.

[Nikki Stone1]

6. We ALL need to comment on that page: The LA Times has blood on its hands

Because it does.

[EFerrari]

8. Done.

Cynical @ssholes. They know exactly what they are doing to our teachers.

[Nikki Stone1]

9. Of course they do.

Wonder how many of them own stock in Green Dot?

[Nikki Stone1]

10. The page still says "Comments 0"

I put one in too and it hasn't been printed.

[EFerrari]

11. Comments are screened. But it doesn't matter if they put them up or not.

They read them.

[Nikki Stone1]

12. I wrote that the LA Times had blood on its hands

Let's see if the cowardly fucks print that.

[EFerrari]

13. I wrote thanking them for promoting Arne Duncan's war on teachers

and asked how many more teachers will be lost as the privateers' line their pockets and our schools are de-professionalized.

[Nikki Stone1]

14. Excellent

They'll probably not print that either, but I hope they do.

[Nikki Stone1]

15. K&R

.

[Odin2005]

17. They pretty much MURDERED him, the fuckers!

[Nikki Stone1]

Yep.

They don't give a shit either.

[Nikki Stone1]

20. Yep.

They don't give a shit either.

[Nikki Stone1]

18. The Pasadena Star News has an article and comments

http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/news/ci_16180072

Comments: http://www.topix.net/forum/source/pasadena-star-news/TB97UR3IHVDURFK3U

[Nikki Stone1]

19. And here is a San Diego paper

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010/sep/26/missing-teacher-found-dead-beneath-la-area-bridge/

[Hannah Bell]

22. still no comments posted.

[boppers]

23. He killed himself over a low grade?

When students do that, do we say that their "Teachers have blood on their hands"?

[Pholus]

24. Student grades = private. LA Times grades = "public shaming" for political purposes.

If this were being handled professionally and by people who actually cared, it would be discrete.

But this is being done by businessmen, politicians and the oligarchs. They want this to be a Jerry Springer thing out in the glare of the spotlights. It's a PR stunt, not real change.

Professionalism wouldn't serve their agenda of dismantling public education in favor of $$$$PROFIT$$$$. They need a public face that they can claim represents a broken system so we'll buy into their bullsh*t and slit our own wrists for them.

[seabeyond]

25. give me another profession, any profession where evaluations are public notices

how about your job. be evaluated and then have it in the paper, all the subjective criticism.

i cannot imagine one adult allow judgment by another to be notified in the newspaper

[NNN0LHI]

27. NYT and other rags were doing one hit piece after another on US union autoworkers couple years ago

And they were outright lying about us too. I was posting their crap here but no one seemed to care. Everyone around here was too busy bragging up their non-union scab made or imported vehicles here to notice I guess?

Don

[boppers]

28. I write public code for one part of my profession.

Not only is it scrutinized, it's emailed, blogged, and criticized by millions of people, in the public sphere, and for an added bonus, there's no editorial control of what is said. So, I know what it's like to have *every single line of text* I've written subjected to the opinions of millions. Of course, my screw ups (hopefully) rarely get missed, precisely *because* there is so much scrutiny.

So for the sake of discussion, lets try another profession:
http://www.healthcarechoices.org/profile.htm

When you are committing malpractice, regardless of being a teacher or a family doctor, you shouldn't be allowed to hide behind privacy controls, because you are potentially doing serious harm to other people's entire lives.

[Hannah Bell]

29. this ratings system has nothing to do with malpractice, and your analogies are all fail.

There is no list of named coders from one city published in a major national paper ranking them from best to worst, using an opaque rubric where the readers can't look at the data themselves & figure out how the results were obtained. Nor a list of doctors, nor any other profession.

The ratings were paid for by Bill Gates & done by a RAND Corp (Defense) analyst -- not by the district.

The results, as one poster noted, correlate entirely with the socio-economic status of the neighborhoods where the students were enrolled.

If you put the "good" teachers from the "good" neighborhoods into the "bad" ones & vice-versa, the results would also reverse, on average.

[boppers]

30. Their patients/students died/failed.

I think you would often find that doctors (and coders) who work in poor areas have the same struggle as teachers with finding success. Being poor fucks a person up, and everyone around them.

FWIW, it also works the same in software projects, with many confounding variables, so those who only look at the surface have only the shallowest of data. This is why F/OSS is so focused on meritocracy (but is still blind to poverty).

What interests me the most in software (and in this case) are those who "break out" of the expected data. There were five top-rated teachers at the same school as the tragedy, regardless of the SES conditions (thus, the data does not "correlate entirely"). This follows a condition seen in software, and possibly other fields, that there are the stellar breakouts, and there are the average folks, and the bad apples at the bottom.

A flat model, often advocated in the last century, assumed that all workers were more or less equal, regardless of the data.

The heresy that not all "X" are equal is difficult to discuss, especially in a Unionized field, because there is an assumption that all labor is equal.

[Hannah Bell]

31. ...

[Hannah Bell]

32. There were 35 teachers rated at the school.

3 = "most effective" (8.6%)
4 = "more effective" (11.4%)

Of these 7 teachers, the ratings of 3/7 (43%) were based on 2-3 years' scores only (v. the full possible 7).

= 20%


5 = "average" (15%)


11 = "less effective" (31%)
12 = "least effective" (34%)

= 65% below average, 80% average or lower.


The school was rated as "least effective". 60% of students have english as their second language.


I checked the first 15 schools on the "most effective" & "least effective" lists.

On the "most effective" list, 80% of the schools were in above-average SES areas (a number of them *very* high) & only 7% (1 school) in below-average SES areas.

On the "least effective" list, 67% of schools were in below-average SES areas & only 20% (3 schools) in above-average SES areas -- & all three of those were on the border of "average".


Teaching isn't comparable to coding, which is something coders don't get.

[boppers]

36. Thanks for the detailed breakdown. (I wonder where I got 5?)

Everything is comparable to coding, it's the *accuracy* of the comparison that needs to be questioned.

:)

[mainer]

33. I agree. Imagine your neighbors all knowing about it.

A coder doesn't have to feel the shame of everyone on his block knowing he's a failure. No newspaper publishes the names of "bad coders."

Doctors do have to deal with this, but their responsibility for human life places them in a different category.

[Hannah Bell]

34. Individual doctors maybe, but so far as I know, no major newspaper has published an ongoing series

scapegoating doctors as a class for all the ills of public health, linked to ratings of doctors on a hierarchical scale.

[AngryAmish]

35. filmmaker, dancer, chef, trial lawyer, baseball player...

[NNN0LHI]

26. LA Times gave us the Saddam has "Winnebagos of Death" meme

They should never be trusted.

End of story.

Don