OUTRAGE OF THE DAY
A letter to parents who complained about a special education teacher who was later found guilty of abuse.
Source: here.
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Saturday, March 24, 2007
A National Teacher Registry
The New York Times-owned Herald-Tribune (Sarasota, Florida) made a number of recommendations at the conclusion of their series, "Broken Trust."
One that caught our attention involved NASDTEC ("National Association of State Directors of Teacher Education and Certification".) The Herald-Tribune wrote:
Not every teacher discipline is reportable to NASDTEC. Most of those thousands of cases would never be reported to NASDTEC. Most cases in Florida aren't even consistently reported to the Florida Department of Education, which was one of the major findings of the newspaper investigation.
What their own series points out and brutally documents is that school officials, school districts and state education authorities are not regularly, routinely, even half-heartedly disciplining teachers. The newspaper reviewed more than 14,000 investigations and found 70% of the cases were dismissed after a review by untrained investigators.
On the off chance that a case reaches the state level, the state closes 9 out of 10 cases by rubberstamping the settlement agreement deals hashed out between accused teachers and attorneys representing the education department. The settlement agreement avoids an admission of guilt, and no one is the wiser. Short of outright revocation of a certificate, the teacher may be hired by another district.
As a consequence, the system allows many of those same people to continue to teach and be unwittingly hired by another school district -- in other states, but not infrequently in Florida. Teachers like the teacher who had sex with two boys in one county who is now teaching second graders in another Florida county. She is not an exception, as the series documents.
Another finding is that the state isn't providing teacher discipline information to their own schools. If that's so, why would the Herald-Tribune expect them to report it to NASDTEC? Yet other states claim that they rely on NASDTEC for hiring new teachers. It's one of those background check things.
This is how the Pennsylvania Department of Education describes it.
To their credit, Pennsylvania publishes disciplinary actions, minus private reprimands, online. They also provide the reason why there are only 35,000 names on that list. Pennsylvania, and we assume other states, only reports those disciplinary actions taken against its educators that are public. In other words, only discipline that affects certification - public reprimand, surrender or revocation of a certificate that are public. How many settlement agreements have a provision that the results are not public?
States are not forced to rely on NASDTEC. They choose to do so because a national database would no longer depend upon voluntary reporting some teachers, but not all. If a database of disciplined teachers is to be of any use, a registry has to be complete and that means mandatory reporting and sanctions for non-compliance.
States join NASDTEC to hire teachers who are certified in other states.
Using a non-profit may keep bad news out of the headlines and away from public scrutiny, but it doesn't help parents or help schools hire teachers we can trust. A national database run by a non-profit supported by members who have a vested interest in avoiding scrutiny of their teachers - even by themselves - is not a good idea.
Better than NASDTEC, the U.S. Department of Education should maintain a database of disciplined teachers. For a number of reasons:
Women marry and can change names. Social Security number is a constant.
The U.S. Dept. of Education can act as impartially as NASDTEC.
A U.S. Dept. of Education system would be transparent.
Their findings would be public information and their records would be subject to the Freedom of Information Act.
A Federal statistical analysis would quantify the problem.
Reporting for a Federal program would not be voluntary and haphazard.
Best of all, there would be no more excuses for accepting previously-disciplined teachers. No more 'passing the trash" from school to school, district to district, and state to state.
And a List 99 would be good idea too.
UPDATED In conjunction with the Associated Press stories in October and November 2007, were several references to the information available from NASDTEC. The NASDTEC list only provides identifying information such as names, birth dates and Social Security numbers, nothing describing a teacher’s past problems, leaving it up to a state agency or a hiring school district to dig deeper.
UPDATED In December 2007, the Herald-Tribune gained access to the NASDTEC list through a public records request. Entry Their findings confirm what we found, as well as something else. The list contained 10,000 names less than what NASDTEC officials said existed in the complete database early this year.
The number of cases reported to NASDTEC by state. Entry
REMINDER: This database dates back to the 1980s.
One that caught our attention involved NASDTEC ("National Association of State Directors of Teacher Education and Certification".) The Herald-Tribune wrote:
School districts across the country operate largely as individual entities with little central oversight.There are some pretty glaring omissions there and a few distortions. For instance, if every state (and Canada and New Zealand) regularly reports, as the newspaper claims, teachers who have been punished to NASDTEC, how come the database only includes 35,000 names going back to the 1980s? Florida alone, the newspaper reports, has several thousand cases over the past five years. They infer that those thousand cases would have been on that database if only state authorites acted.
The federal government does not keep a registry of teachers who have been accused or punished for misconduct. So it is difficult to prevent abusive teachers from leaving one state and getting a job in another.
States are forced to rely on NASDTEC, a tiny, nonprofit company that maintains the only national database of teacher misconduct cases in the country. NASDTEC's database is an invaluable resource to state education departments, which pay to become members and get access to the database plus training conferences offered by the nonprofit group. All 50 states and school districts in some other countries are NASDTEC members. Each member regularly reports teachers who have been punished to NASDTEC.
In exchange, the members can access the company's database to see if new hires have been flagged by other states. But NASDTEC, largely a one-man company, is woefully underfunded and has been ignored by the federal government. Its database of teachers going back to the 1980s has about 35,000 names, a small fraction of the number of teachers who have been sanctioned. Florida alone has several thousand over the past five years.
Executive Director Roy Einreinhofer said appeals to Congress for money have gone ignored.
Not every teacher discipline is reportable to NASDTEC. Most of those thousands of cases would never be reported to NASDTEC. Most cases in Florida aren't even consistently reported to the Florida Department of Education, which was one of the major findings of the newspaper investigation.
What their own series points out and brutally documents is that school officials, school districts and state education authorities are not regularly, routinely, even half-heartedly disciplining teachers. The newspaper reviewed more than 14,000 investigations and found 70% of the cases were dismissed after a review by untrained investigators.
On the off chance that a case reaches the state level, the state closes 9 out of 10 cases by rubberstamping the settlement agreement deals hashed out between accused teachers and attorneys representing the education department. The settlement agreement avoids an admission of guilt, and no one is the wiser. Short of outright revocation of a certificate, the teacher may be hired by another district.
As a consequence, the system allows many of those same people to continue to teach and be unwittingly hired by another school district -- in other states, but not infrequently in Florida. Teachers like the teacher who had sex with two boys in one county who is now teaching second graders in another Florida county. She is not an exception, as the series documents.
Another finding is that the state isn't providing teacher discipline information to their own schools. If that's so, why would the Herald-Tribune expect them to report it to NASDTEC? Yet other states claim that they rely on NASDTEC for hiring new teachers. It's one of those background check things.
This is how the Pennsylvania Department of Education describes it.
The NASDTEC ("National Association of State Directors of Teacher Education and Certification") Clearinghouse is the national collection point for professional educator discipline actions taken by the fifty states, the District of Columbia, U.S. Department of Defense Educational Opportunity schools, the U.S. Territories, British Columbia, Ontario, and New Zealand.There's more, but they conclude,
NASDTEC, through the Clearinghouse, maintains a database of all disciplinary actions reported by NASDTEC members and disseminates this information to all participating jurisdictions. The goal of the Clearinghouse is to provide each NASDTEC member/jurisdiction with a notification of an action taken against the certificate/license of an educator by other member states/jurisdictions.
The Clearinghouse is designed to provide individual states/jurisdictions with pertinent information in order to ascertain whether the candidate or applicant poses a threat to the safety and welfare of the children within its borders.With 35,000 names total and one employee?
To their credit, Pennsylvania publishes disciplinary actions, minus private reprimands, online. They also provide the reason why there are only 35,000 names on that list. Pennsylvania, and we assume other states, only reports those disciplinary actions taken against its educators that are public. In other words, only discipline that affects certification - public reprimand, surrender or revocation of a certificate that are public. How many settlement agreements have a provision that the results are not public?
States are not forced to rely on NASDTEC. They choose to do so because a national database would no longer depend upon voluntary reporting some teachers, but not all. If a database of disciplined teachers is to be of any use, a registry has to be complete and that means mandatory reporting and sanctions for non-compliance.
States join NASDTEC to hire teachers who are certified in other states.
Using a non-profit may keep bad news out of the headlines and away from public scrutiny, but it doesn't help parents or help schools hire teachers we can trust. A national database run by a non-profit supported by members who have a vested interest in avoiding scrutiny of their teachers - even by themselves - is not a good idea.
Better than NASDTEC, the U.S. Department of Education should maintain a database of disciplined teachers. For a number of reasons:
Women marry and can change names. Social Security number is a constant.
The U.S. Dept. of Education can act as impartially as NASDTEC.
A U.S. Dept. of Education system would be transparent.
Their findings would be public information and their records would be subject to the Freedom of Information Act.
A Federal statistical analysis would quantify the problem.
Reporting for a Federal program would not be voluntary and haphazard.
Best of all, there would be no more excuses for accepting previously-disciplined teachers. No more 'passing the trash" from school to school, district to district, and state to state.
And a List 99 would be good idea too.
UPDATED In conjunction with the Associated Press stories in October and November 2007, were several references to the information available from NASDTEC. The NASDTEC list only provides identifying information such as names, birth dates and Social Security numbers, nothing describing a teacher’s past problems, leaving it up to a state agency or a hiring school district to dig deeper.
UPDATED In December 2007, the Herald-Tribune gained access to the NASDTEC list through a public records request. Entry Their findings confirm what we found, as well as something else. The list contained 10,000 names less than what NASDTEC officials said existed in the complete database early this year.
The number of cases reported to NASDTEC by state. Entry
REMINDER: This database dates back to the 1980s.