Fifth-grade teacher Rigoberto Ruelas committed suicide in Los Angeles in September.
The California teacher was found dead in a ravine after the Los Angeles Times released a database that ranked teachers by name. Mr. Ruelas, whom colleagues said was “so dedicated that he spent much of his personal time outside school working with students,” was listed as “less effective than average” based on how his students did on standardized tests.
Less effective than average.
My party-wall neighbor just had the plumber in. Earnie Alexander had to dig a tunnel under the house to repair a broken sewer pipe. I’m hoping that Earnie is more effective than average. Otherwise my feet are likely to get wet. And stinky.
Less effective than average.
Our friend Tom “Parle-vous” Parlett is a nuclear engineer who worked (note the past tense) for one of the few remaining Fortune 500 manufacturers of power plants. A few years ago, looking for a way to reduce payroll, his employer implemented forced ranking. The intense yearly evaluations identified Parle-vous as “less effective than average.” That bottom 10 percent set him up for a buyout which he took.
I don’t like forced ranking because it decimates morale. But the first half of the equation, the intense yearly evaluations to measure achievement, tells us whether or not we are doing out jobs. (Parle-vous is now the top performer in a different organization.)
We don’t have a big pot of money to offer [teachers] to sign off on performance contracts, Monroe County School Board Chair John Dick told Anne O’Bannon this morning on the Morning Mix. Means there will be no way to tell if we are doing our jobs in the Keys.
Less effective than average.
A Broward County history teacher wrote to the Miami Herald ombudsman about the suicide. “Ruelas will not be the only teacher casualty if … attacks [in the news media] continue,” that teacher wrote. “…You will see that the coverage has been overwhelmingly pro ‘reform,’ with teachers getting much criticism. There has been very little defense of teachers.”
Huh.
A teacher commits suicide because it suddenly became public that he maybe wasn’t as good at what he did as his press kit said he was.
Toyota advertises that, nationwide, 80% of all their cars sold in the last 12 years are still on the road (of course that means that about 19,000,000 cars have been abandoned, crushed, or sunk in lakes around Chicago). Nationwide, 7,000 students drop out every day and only about 70 percent of students graduate from high school with a regular high school diploma (of course that means 16,800,000 of today’s students will end up on the dole). Nationwide, Toyota’s recall troubles over gas pedals and other sudden acceleration glitches standing at at least 5.3 million vehicles across much of their product line (of course, that means 85 percent of recent Toyotas with probably won’t kill their passengers but 15 percent could).
Less effective than average.
Congress very nearly demanded Akio Toyoda commit hara-kiri.
Teachers demanded raises.
Full disclosure. In the 80s, I founded and chaired a school support group to encourage students and teachers alike. I chaired a committee to design, spec, and build a new elementary school. I have attended training in Mastery Learning at Johnson City, NY. I was a college instructor. And I led the charge to raise teacher pay during that period.
It was necessary then because teachers were overperforming despite all of our underpaying.
It is different today. Today we can no longer “throw money at a problem” and expect it to change. The return we get is a more expensive problem.
“Simply put, the world has changed and there is no work for high school dropouts,” said Dr. Robert Balfanz, Ph. D, a research scientist at the Johns Hopkins University. “To meet its graduation challenge, the nation must find a solution for its dropout factories.”
Maybe a teacher committed suicide because all the work that he’d poured out his life into was being declared less than the work he saw others around him pouring less of theirs into, and that filled him with despair.
People die by their own hands but the real culprit usually is cruelty, hopelessness, mental illness. When your best isn’t good enough, the harsh world of random measures to which you give what appears to me as excessive credence suggests you should. . . disappear. He’s just following the logic of a world that’s subverted Darwinism into a social construct.
Chris.tine had me with “People die by their own hands but the real culprit usually is … mental illness.
The story he told himself may well have been that his best wasnt good enough, that the harsh world suggested he should … disappear, that he just followed the logic Darwinism as a social construct. We’ll probably never know.
We do know something in his psyche caused him to die by his own hand.
People do that. It is a shame but it is their fault, not ours, if they cannot accept the truth.
Not so much “fault”, because chemical imbalances are not always under the control of the suicide victim.
“The truth.” And which one would that be?
Yeah, I used two bits of shorthand that, like the word gay are fraught with danger to right-thinking or left-thinking people.
Gekko is right, of course. Neither you nor I caused the chemical imbalance either.
That leaves Chris.tine’s search for truth. In this forum, assume that “truth” means “an observation supported by data” or “a fact that has been verified.”
Nice evasive tactic. Which truth do you suggest the poor teacher and other suicides accept?
Just the facts, ma’am.
Remember that I am not a psychiatrist nor do I play one on TV. That said, I reckon that if someone is truly suicidal — usually best evidenced by a successful attempt — neither promoting nor withholding the facts will make much difference.
Which truth do I suggest a suicide accept? That’s simple. Every person who has jumped off a bridge and survived by accident reports having a moment of clarity between stepping into space and hitting the ground: they all really really wish they hadn’t done it.
The only “truth” I can see here is really more a bit of clear thinking (to which the garden-variety suicide probably doesn’t have access at the time): “This too shall pass.”
But those who kill themselves are in such pain, are so sad, that they can’t make that leap to a possible future from the actual present.
Of course, while the pain doesn’t last, neither does the pleasure. Whatever it is will pass. You have to have a pretty solid grounding to hang onto that “truth.”
I don’t believe survivors all wish they hadn’t done it. They wish they had succeeded in removing pain, not getting themselves into more of it. Then later they might be glad they’d failed.
And now the caveat. I suspect you and I might agree that we are not talking about people with terminal illness in this particular debate. . .
@Chris.tine: “I suspect you and I might agree that we are not talking about people with terminal illness in this particular debate. . .”
We do agree.
FWIW, I don’t know that all survivors wish they hadn’t done it. I do know I have read that statistic and have reported it. It does ring true to me.
Getting back on track for the moment, this piece was neither about Rigoberto Ruelas suicide nor an attempt to prevent suicide in general.
The Broward County teacher wrote to the ombudsman because, in the teachers view, teachers like Mr. Ruelas are doing an excellent job and the press and public have all been bashing them.
I take the contrary view and have offered a small amount of data and an interesting analogy to back it up. See, almost a third of students never graduate from high school. Those who do perform poorly by every measure.
Even discounting how bad that is for the students and for the country, thats simply bad teaching.
The U.S. Department of Labor estimates 90 percent of new high-growth, high-wage jobs will require postsecondary education.
Cutting the dropout rate in half would yield $45 billion annually in new federal tax revenues or cost savings, according to a recent report by Columbia Universitys Center for Benefit-Cost Studies of Education at Teachers College.
Any other questions?
It really irks me when my own login fails the @#$%^ Hash-cash.
Suicide. Huh. I’d figured on first reading that somebody had dusted the dude. Suicide. How ’bout that.
You seem to have spent a little too long in the hot sun here, chief. First you present the bad effects of forced rankings on employees and note that some company culled itself some effective talent. Then you complain that teachers are complaining about being evaluated.
Isn’t it possible that teachers don’t like being evaluated because the parameters of the evaluation do not capture the work that they do.
Look teaching outcomes are a contract between a teacher and a student if one of those two parties isn’t buying in, there’s not a lot the other can do. If 70% of the students are not getting diplomas, I think that reflects on the poor control we have in this country over who reproduces, not the poor quality of the teachers.
To evaluate the teachers, you have to look at whether the kids that got the good grades were able to produce at the next level, not the failure rates, cause some folks are pretty much unteachable.
We should just pay them a cut of their student’s future earnings. I used to have a neighbor that taught Bill Gates in the third grade. She didn’t strike me as that great a teacher, and she said he wasn’t that bright a kid. But she’d sure have raked it in if we compensated teachers like we compensate CEO’s and Wall Streeters.
So what’s the point? I don’t know. I see teaching as a process, one where you’ve got to keep pitching the curriculum and try to keep it interesting, but where the effectiveness of the teaching and the curriculum is pretty much impossible to measure effectively without spending as much on measuring the teaching as on the actual teaching itself. (which would prolly work. but at twice the cost)
But at the end of the day, many of us are driven to despair by the means which our employer’s evaluate us. If only we could just do our jobs.
[Ed. Note: This came in from an email correspondent. It is very germane to the discussion]
@Dick wrote: “‘There has been very little defense of teachers.'”
Maybe that’s because Johnny can’t read?”
The biggest reason that Johnny can’t read is because of George Bush’s inane, insane ‘No Child Left behind’ program that has forced teachers to teach to the test. Conservatives ought to be demanding that such a stupid GOVERNMENT policy ought to be tossed out.
Lee wrote: “The biggest reason that Johnny can’t read is because of George Bush’s inane, insane ‘No Child Left behind’ program that has forced teachers to teach to the test.”
There are a lot of bad things about No Child Gets Ahead but the concept of teaching to standards and testing for it is not one of them.
See, teachers have been “teaching to the test” ever since there were, well, tests. I know that for three reasons. I’ve been a student. I’ve been a teacher. I come from a family with at least a couple of other teachers innit.
Liberals have vilified teaching to the test not because it is necessarily evil to teach what you want and then determine whether the kids have learned it but because liberals don’t like tests. Period. Tests might hurt a poor student’s self esteem. Tests might set up competition. Tests might actually force kids to learn.
Lee wrote: “Conservatives ought to be demanding that such a stupid
GOVERNMENT policy ought to be tossed out.”
I agree. Conservatives ought to be demanding that ALL such stupid GOVERNMENT policies ought to be tossed out.
The tempo of talks with the United Teachers of Monroe has changed since the election so Superintendent Joseph Burke says he hopes to wrap up negotiations quickly. Burke says both sides are closer than ever to reaching an agreement for a new three-year contract that will include raises, but also introduce performance measures for the first time as part of teacher evaluations and compensation.
“I think we’re dangerously close to an agreement,” Burke said. Dangerously close? Dangerously???
Heh.
@Throckey: “Isn’t it possible that teachers don’t like being evaluated because the parameters of the evaluation do not capture the work that they do.”
No.
Teachers allege that they are professionals. As professionals, they can surely develop parameters of evaluation that do capture the work that they do.
Don’t call me shirley.
Think of MBO or any of the myriad of other private sector performance evaluation tools for a moment. Employees rightfully do not like the forced ranking some employers force on them but most do like a plan that allows them to set objectives at the beginning of a period, then compare their results to those goals at the end.
Good teachers like that. It is the anathema to educators.
@Dick “No.
Teachers allege that they are professionals. As professionals, they can surely develop parameters of evaluation that do capture the work that they do.”
Well yes and no. My son’s teachers (8th grade) parameterize their evalaution of of where their students are in relation to what they have been teaching them.
But they are judged according to the state test, which most of the legislators that voted for it cannot pass. (which does not reflect on the test so much as the quality of legislators money can buy.
You seem to be living in some kind of liberal fantasyland, wherein the smart people can decide their own fate.
It is not so here in reality land. (where, incidentally we send half our kids off to college with college credits under their belt. (and that’s not half the “college bound” students, that’s half the students.))