Rigoberto Ruelas

It seems fitting to remember the LA schoolteacher who tragically took his own life after being named a "bad teacher" by the LA Times when that newspaper conducted its own witch hunt of teachers using a value-added measurement system that had a high margin of error.

His name was Rigoberto Ruelas.

Who will be the first teacher in NYC to suffer some tragedy as a result of the public shaming that comes from having names and ratings published in the newspapers (ratings that have very high MOE's, btw)?

What will the circumstances be?

Will it be a suicide, as in Los Angeles?

Will some vigilante decide to take street justice to a "bad teacher" who gave their kid a failing grade?

You can be sure that this publishing of the TDR's with names attached will have some dire consequences even if no violence occurs.

You can't pin scarlet letters on teachers in a public shaming exhibition and not expect there to be fallout.

One major consequence of this will be that fewer college students are going to want to be teachers.

I mean, who would want to spend time and money on a college degree for a job where politicians and media elites criticize you daily as THE problem, where you have little job security (now that tenure has effectively been abolished via the new New York State evaluation system, there is no job security), where employees are rated by a system with a margin of error as high as 54%, and publicly humiliated by having their names and rankings in that error-riddled evaluation system published in the media?

The politicians from Bloomberg to Cuomo to Obama all talk about how they want to make sure there is an "effective teacher" in every classroom, and yet the "reforms" they have undertaken on the school system, the curriculum, teacher preparation programs and teacher evaluation systems will ensure that good teachers in the system will either be fired based on an error-riddled evaluation or leave after receiving a public shaming via the same error-riddled eval system.

In effect, they are ensuring that anybody who could be an "effective teacher" wouldn't want to place their own financial security on a job that is so unstable, where the evaluation system is so arbitrary and unfair, and where the media and the political and education establishments all are invested in scapegoating the workforce so they can skate on their own accountability for the problems in public education.

This is where we are at today - the publishing of the error-riddled TDR's crystallize this.