It’s natural to assume that there must have been other things going on in Mr. Ruelas’s life, that mentally stable people do not commit suicide over a subpar work evaluation. However, there were several very unusual things about this particular evaluation. It was not performed by his employer, but by an outside agency according to criteria that Ruelas was not informed about or judged on. Teachers in L.A. did not even have this information before it was published by the L.A. Times. And L.A. Unified had never communicated to teachers that this was a principal means of evaluating them. Even more importantly, this evaluation, which reduced a teacher’s entire career to a single dubious rating, was published by one of the most prominent newspapers in the world. I don’t think there is any precedent for having any employees publicly rated in this manner.
As a research professor at a major university, I have to carefully adhere to rules of ethics in carrying out research. One of those rules is anonymity–I am not allowed to publish people’ names without their permission if there is any way that my doing so can bring unnecessary or disproportionate embarrassment, humiliation, or other harm to them. If I wished to do a study of this type and publish teachers’ individual names with their ratings, my university never would have permitted me to do so.
There are of course differences between journalism and scholarly research, and journalists thus operate by different rules. And the rules that journalists operate by are not codified in the way that university research rules are. One would hope, however, that a respected news organization such as the L.A. Times would operate with at least a modicum of ethical concern, which was clearly violated by publishing individual names of teachers and thus bringing public shame and humiliation, without sufficient evidence that the rankings even accurately reflected teachers’ actual contributions.
Nobody knows, of course, exactly what was going on in Rigoberto Ruelas’s mind in the weeks and days before his death. However, we do know that it is a terrible idea to publicly humiliate dedicated public servants based on inaccurate and incomplete value-added ratings. The L.A. Times should take the ratings down. That’s the least the newspaper can do to honor Ruelas’s memory.
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