A five month-long CBC-TV Marketplace investigation into “Teacher Misconduct” aired on April 8, 2016 —and it confirmed much that we already know about the current state of the Canadian teaching profession. Fewer than 400 teachers have been dismissed over the past ten years, out of a teacher force that now exceeds 400,000 in our 10 provinces and 3 territories. Only 1.7 out of every 1,000 teachers was “weeded out” of the profession over the past ten years. That begs the fundamental question – who is really served by the current teaching profession regulation and discipline regime?
The CBC Marketplace National Report Card also revealed that teacher discipline decisions are often kept secret, can take years to resolve and that credentials are rarely revoked. In nine of the 13 educational jurisdictions, no information is publicly available, including past disciplinary measures. Even guilty findings are kept private across most of Canada by bodies responsible for keeping students safe.
The two major cases highlighted in the CBC Marketplace investigation are perfect examples of what happens and why in too many cases of serious teacher misconduct. As a 12-year old girl, Carmen North and twenty other teen girls in Oakville, Ontario, were “tracked” on MSN by Mr. Gavin Bradford, a “cool teacher” with a sexually-charged ‘food fetish.’ While he was removed from the school, it took five years to remove his teaching certificate, allowing him to teach for two more years in Scotland.
Eleven year-old Fredericton girl, Karley Merrill, was bullied by a mean woman teacher so much that she missed 41 days of school and had to be sent to the hospital during one particularly bad spell. Unable to get any response at the school level, her mother wrote directly to the New Brunswick Minister of Education. One day an official-sounding letter arrived stating only that the teacher had been disciplined for “Category 2: Misconduct.” You can only imagine how upset the Merrill family was to discover, the next year, that the same teacher was doing it again at another school across town.
If all of this sounds familiar, it should be– because I was invited by CBC TV’s Marketplace to assist with their Teacher Discipline research and we started with my February 2014 AIMS research report, co-authored with Karen Mitchell, with the intriguing title “Maintaining Spotless Records.” It was particularly heartening for us to learn that, for the most part, the CBC investigation corroborated our findings and embraced our principal recommendation for significantly ‘beefed-up’ teacher regulation and accountability.
Since the release of our report and the recent CBC Marketplace investigation, the issue of teacher discipline has gained considerable policy traction. The new BC Teacher Regulation Branch, replacing the teacher union-dominated BC College of Teachers, has proven far more effective, most recently clamping down on the flagrant abuse of “teacher sick days.” Saskatchewan has acted upon Dr. Dennis Kendel’s November 2013 report and is now publishing teacher records, albeit disclosing only infractions since the start of the registry.
Three other Canadian provinces are making audible noises about changing their teacher discipline regimes. After beating back the Alberta Teaching Excellence initiative and forcing-out Education Minister Jeff Johnson, the Alberta Teachers Association has opened the door a tiny crack on teacher records. Nova Scotia’s January 2015 Three Rs Reform Plan proposed — for the first time – to actually discuss the novel concept of establishing “teacher standards” and plugging the holes in teacher regulation with the Nova Scotia Teachers Union. In New Brunswick, the CBC Marketplace investigation was such an eye-opener that Education Minister Serge Rousselle conceded that the province was now “looking at” more public disclosure.
My comments on the CBC Marketplace revelations perhaps warrant repeating: “We should be able to find information about whether teachers have had any current or past indiscretions, whether they’ve been found guilty of any offences and what steps have been taken to try to remediate those….We also need to know if there are teachers teaching in the system who shouldn’t be, and [if they] should be removed from teaching positions or … given much more stringent disciplinary measures…Right now, teachers are better protected than students.”
Public access to more serious disciplinary decisions in provinces where there is little available would improve the system “significantly,” I told CBC Marketplace. “It would make everyone much more attuned to the importance of performing well and it would give those teachers that are doing a great job — and that’s the majority of them — some confidence that they were actually in a profession.”
A positive first step might be to actually articulate a clear set of teaching quality standards, before proceeding to significantly upgrade teacher accreditation, regulation, and de-certification. Weeds left unattended, after all, tend to take over the garden.
Weeding out the few “bad apples” in the profession would seem to be in everyone’s interest – students, teachers, parents, and the public. So what is standing in the way of introducing more effective teacher evaluation and discipline in Canadian schools?
Educhatter 