Popular fifth-grade teacher Rigoberto Ruelas’s suicide in late September rocked the community surrounding Miramonte Elementary School in Los Angeles. Ruelas deliberately drove his car off a cliff in the nearby Angeles Crest.
 Teachers and their unions are under attack |
Friends and family described Ruelas as distraught after the Los Angeles Times published an evaluation based on student standardized test scores for many teachers and labeled Ruelas as “less effective” and “average” in regards to his ability to raise test scores.
The LA Times used a methodology called value-added analysis to evaluate 6,000 teachers in LA Unified School District and then printed the scores. The methodology uses students’ test scores to project students’ expected improvement for the coming year. After taking the test again, the difference between the students’ final test scores and the projected results determines the “value” the teacher added to the student. After all of the teacher’s students’ scores are averaged together, the VAM score for the
teacher is determined.
The score and label used by the LA Times only takes into account standardized test scores—which are an inaccurate representation of student performance and measure socioeconomic factors more than anything else. Standardized tests do not measure factors like students coming to school hungry or going through traumatic family experiences such as divorce or the death of a loved one. The method has been proven to be highly unscientific and inaccurate.
The local teachers’ union, United Teachers of Los Angeles, has called for a boycott of the LA Times since the newspaper announced it would release the VAM test scores of thousands of LAUSD English and Math teachers in August. In light of the recent tragedy, the Ruelas family has stated that they, too, are taking part in the boycott of the LA Times.
The LA Times, in evaluating teachers this way, and printing the scores, joined a ruling class onslaught against public education.
Public education is being chipped away at by the remnants of No Child Left Behind and the current Race to the Top.
The central tenet of the attacks on public education is that “bad” teachers are the problem with public education. When critics of public education say “bad” or “good,” they refer only to a teacher’s ability to affect test scores. Test scores, not writing or reading skills, mathematical reasoning, scientific understanding or critical thinking, are the purpose of education, in this view.
Inaccurate methods of scoring and evaluating teachers are touted as so-called scientific proof of this claim. This is an attempt to avoid talking about the real problems in public education—the increasing poverty of working-class students, cuts in resources and programs and worsening conditions and pay for teachers and other education workers combined with mass layoffs.
For dedicated veteran teachers like Ruelas, these attacks can have disastrous personal consequences. Not only do teachers face the daily stress of administrative and district pressures to teach to the test and do more with less, they are now arbitrarily labeled effective or ineffective. Those labels and the unscientific “scores” are then printed in the newspaper.
By all accounts from people close to Ruelas, he was an accomplished teacher and a highly influential leader in his community. He willingly taught the most challenging students at Miramonte and persuaded many students in his 14 years of teaching to continue their education and avoid the pitfalls of gangs and drugs.
Ruelas worked weekends and stayed after school every day to tutor students in need. “He wasn’t just a teacher to me, he was a second father,” said 13-year-old Karla Gonzalez. Ruelas had helped her learn English when she arrived from Mexico and bought her books to read. “I will always be grateful to him,” she said.
Colleagues describe Ruelas as a dedicated professional who wanted to help the community around Miramonte, the neighborhood in which he grew up.
Obviously the profound positive effect Ruelas had on his students and his community cannot be measured by a test score. Many dedicated teachers like Ruelas are unjustifiably being slandered as bad teachers. The local teachers’union, UTLA, should continue holding demonstrations and actions aimed at the LA Times until the newspapers’ hateful teacher bashing campaign comes to an end.
