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Friday, December 28, 2007
Tracking Troubled Teachers: Shouldn’t More Be Done?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Last week, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune published a confidential national database that includes names of teachers who have been professionally sanctioned at some point in their careers.
Created for the National Association of State Directors of Teacher Education and Certification, the purpose of the database was to help track rogue educators — particularly those who may have harmed children — and prevent them from obtaining teaching jobs in other states, if necessary.
Now Georgia officials — who were actively involved in creating the so-called Clearinghouse — are concerned the whole effort may be abandoned because the searchable database was based on voluntary state sharing agreements, which included a provision that the information not be made public.
“Odds are that the whole thing’s probably going to fall apart,” Gary Walker, director of the Educator Ethics Division at the Georgia Professional Standards Commission, told me.
Currently, when a teacher from another state applies for a teaching certificate here, investigators at the PSC run the name against the database. If there’s a match, they call the state where the teacher was flagged and find out what the problem was.
Walker said many of the database cases from Georgia (nearly 3,000) involve ethical, but not necessarily criminal, violations, such as defaulting on a student loan. But he also cited several examples where sex offenders were caught before they were given new jobs because the database acted as a warning system.
I spoke with one metro Atlanta teacher whose name was listed in the Clearinghouse. A former physical education teacher, she told me she had broken her contract two years ago to take a job as a computer support specialist. Her certificate was suspended for about six months, she said, but now is in good standing.
Needless to say, she was horrified her name was included in a database alongside those of child predators. She also was alarmed her identity (name and date of birth) had been exposed by the Florida newspaper’s actions.
“It doesn’t seem fair and it doesn’t seem right that I should be compromised in that way,” she said.
I personally don’t understand why the database wasn’t tailored to include only the most severe cases of teacher misconduct. Then, perhaps, the privacy concerns would be less of an issue.
Walker said there’s a possibility that could happen in the future if the current sharing agreements crumble. But, he added, a new database would take time to develop.
The question: How many students would be put at risk in the meantime?
UPDATE: In a not-altogether-unrelated story, a first-year social studies teacher in Gwinnett County recently resigned his job just two days before being charged with the sexual assault and battery of a female student.
