Calitics:: Teacher Rated Poorly by LA Times Commits Suicide

Calitics:: Teacher Rated Poorly by LA Times Commits Suicide:

Teacher Rated Poorly by LA Times Commits Suicide by: Robert Cruickshank Mon Sep 27, 2010 at 15:00:00 PM PDT

Even though education experts slammed the LA Times for ranking LA Unified teachers based on a flawed metric emphasizing test scores above other factors, the Times went ahead and published the article anyway. Last week we learned that the lowest rated teacher was, in fact, a successful and beloved teacher who eschewed the tests in order to ensure her students had the English language skills they needed for a lifetime of success. Today comes a much more dark and tragic story of another teacher who was given a low ranking in the flawed LA Times article. Rigoberto Ruelas, a teacher at a school in South LA who had been missing, was found dead of an apparent suicide in the Angeles National Forest above LA: "Based upon the entirety of the investigation, the evidence indicates he took his own life in this tragedy," Los Angeles County Sheriff's Capt. Mike Parker said.... KABC-TV Channel 7 quoted family members as saying that Ruelas was distraught about scoring low in a teacher-rating database recently made public by The Times. He had been missing since Sept. 22. South Gate Police Officer Tony Mendez told KCAL-TV Channel 9 that Ruelas was unhappy at his database ranking....