Ugly

Ugly. I have two daughters and if they had a teacher that had made suggestive comments towards them – and he didn’t get fired and didn’t lose his license I would be outraged.

That is what happened in Houston and a reporter there called to ask me what I thought.

I think it is outrageous that we have a system that would allow this teacher to slink away to possibly teach again. I strongly believe that because of the teacher shortage, and groups that fight against new methods of recruiting and certifying teachers, the problem will only get worse.

We don’t usually have HR professionals in districts and schools that are trained to deal with this. We have former teachers in these jobs doing the best that they can. We don’t have a way for states, districts and schools to share issues with teachers. We don’t have a standardized method for performing background checks on teachers and there are too many vendors providing this service. (Hint to principals: in addition to doing a background check - google the name of the teacher BEFORE hiring as the cheapest way to see if they have made the news lately). And we don’t have enough teachers fighting for jobs in the schools.

Until principals have enough teacher candidates to select the right one for their schools and until we get a standardized background check process and until we have districts that take and stand and revoke licenses of teachers making sexual advances towards students – we will have this problem.

And it is outrageous.

The Shallow Pool

When the pool gets shallow, you are going to end up with some of the sludge.

This is my analogy for the AP report on sexual misconduct plaguing schools. It is the unfortunate consequence of not having enough applicants for all the job openings in our schools. When the talent pool gets shallow, school districts end up hiring whoever is available. When HR spends the bulk of their time running around filling jobs at the last minute, the wrong people are going to slip through and get into a classroom.

It is going to get worse and that is an outrage. I was presenting at AASPA and met with numerous district HR people. Some are hiring from overseas and end up being immigration lawyers, housing specialists and cultural integrators – which sucks up so much time that they cannot do the rest of their jobs and the teachers don't work out and leave anyway. Others are venturing far from their state to recruit – costing time and money. For math and science teachers they are lucky to have one qualified applicant for the job and when you only have one applicant you don’t have a choice. They are desperately seeking ways to fill jobs and taking what they can get. Is that what our students deserve – or do they deserve a teacher selected from many great applicants.

Being desperate creates a perfect situation for some of the people listed in the AP article. We have got to fill the talent pool so that our districts do not end up getting the sludge from the bottom.