By Maya Trent · Republished 2026-05-20 · Originally reported by Matthew Fleischer on FishbowlLA, 2010
In autumn 2010 the Los Angeles Times became the story rather than the teller of it. FishbowlLA covered a UC Berkeley panel where one of the paper’s reporters defended a project that had become the center of a national argument about data journalism.
Then
LA Times reporter Jason Felch sat on a Berkeley panel to discuss the paper’s controversial series on teacher evaluations — and, in particular, its decision to publish individual teachers’ names alongside their ‘value-added’ effectiveness scores. The discussion took place after the death of fifth-grade teacher Rigoberto Ruelas, whose family and union colleagues believed the publication of his rating had contributed to his death by suicide.
Felch faced pointed criticism. As the San Jose Mercury News reported, UC Berkeley statistician Sophia Rabe-Hesketh drew applause when she argued that value-added models do not account for factors such as a school’s leadership, environment, materials and curriculum, and concluded that such data “should not be used for high-stakes decisions” or for ‘naming and shaming.’
Anthony Cody, a former Oakland middle-school teacher, framed the series as part of a broader hostility toward the profession, calling Ruelas’s death, in his words, the ‘first casualty in America’s war on teachers.’ FishbowlLA presented the panel as a genuine, unresolved dispute about journalistic responsibility, not a verdict.
Now
The methodological objections aired in that Berkeley room substantially shaped the decade that followed. A growing body of education research cautioned against using value-added measures for individual high-stakes decisions, citing their year-to-year instability and sensitivity to factors outside a teacher’s control.
Policy moved in the same direction. The 2015 federal Every Student Succeeds Act rolled back the test-score-driven teacher-evaluation mandates of the previous era, and many districts stepped away from publishing individual teacher rankings — a quieter ending to the ‘naming and shaming’ approach the panel had debated.
The episode endures in journalism-ethics teaching as a hard case about publishing individual data: the difference between releasing a dataset and weighing the foreseeable human consequences of attaching names to it. FishbowlLA’s contribution was simply to record the moment a newsroom had to answer for that choice in public.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.