Persistence Pays Off in Investigation of Teachers' Sexual Misconduct
Sunday, July 19, 2009 at 8:22PM
Hechinger Institute

Persistence Pays Off in Investigation of Teachers' Sexual Misconduct

By Martha Irvine, Associated Press National Writer


We've all seen the stories about teachers who've gotten in trouble for sexual misconduct of one sort or another. But my editors wanted to know just how serious the problem was. We learned the National Association of State Directors of Teacher Education and Certification kept a list of teachers from its member states who are disciplined for any reason. But that information was not public and wasn't broken down by type of misconduct.

So, my editors asked, could we quantify the national problem ourselves?

It was a request that would take over my life for the better part of a year, as well as the lives of my fellow AP national writer Robert Tanner, our editor John Affleck, senior AP researcher John Parsons, and AP reporters in every state and the District of Columbia.
When we took on this story, we felt educators were a good population to examine, since they work directly with young people and because they are so trusted by parents and other members of the public. We in the media have spent a great deal of time examining the Roman Catholic sex abuse scandal. We felt it was as important to scrutinize professionals who are routinely entrusted with the well-being of our children.
Our goal was to collect the most solid, inarguable data available - state disciplinary records in which educators' teaching licenses were suspended, revoked or compromised in some way. To keep an already ambitious project manageable, we set some parameters early on by seeking records from 2001 through 2005, the most recent year for which data was available in most states. The goal was to focus on sexual misconduct, but we asked for all educators who were disciplined for any reason, for comparison's sake.

A few states, including Pennsylvania and Vermont, had these cases posted online. Easy enough. But getting the remainder of the states' records usually required filing Freedom of Information requests, sometimes repeatedly. In some cases, we enlisted the help of state attorneys general. And sometimes, states became more forthcoming when told, truthfully, that they were among a small number who hadn't given us the records - and that we would note that in our stories. In the end, Maine was the only state that did not comply because of strict privacy laws there.

Our national team of AP reporters fleshed out many of the cases with court, police and prison records, as well as state sex offender registries. Information was triple-checked. We also researched news archives to see what had been written about various cases.

We made note of cases of special interest - and dug even more deeply into those that were representative of our overall findings.

By late September, a team of us met in New York to go through each case, one by one. Our goal was to finalize a national number for educator sexual misconduct. We defined this as educators whose licenses were compromised in some way because they did something deemed sexual, inappropriate and unprofessional in the five-year period we examined. If a case wasn't clearly sexual misconduct, we removed it.

Our final count was 2,570 educators.

The deeper story, however, was that those cases represented only a fraction of sexual misconduct - since educators who get in trouble often do not lose their licenses and, as experts told us, most cases never even get reported.

In California alone, AP reporter Juliet Williams found hundreds of hidden sexual misconduct cases that were not classified as such, often because the educator made a closed-door deal to keep the information private.

In the end, old-fashioned reporting carried us through and led to a three-day national series that was complemented with stories focusing on each state.

The response has been overwhelming. Our day-one national story ran on more than 90 front pages of newspapers across the country. Several news organizations, including USA Today, ran editorials calling for reform.

Lawmakers took note. Several - from Maine and Missouri to Minnesota, South Carolina and New York - have since been working on legislation aimed at requiring background checks or at closing state loopholes that allow rogue educators to go unpunished or to move from one job to another.

Several victims of educator sexual misconduct also contacted us. "I just wanted to say thank you for the story," one reader wrote. "My family has been through something similar and it just made me cry to identify with the hellish experiences of the other victims."

In general, AP reporters found that victims were among the most willing to talk, often out of a wish to educate the public - though many we spoke with requested that their names not be used in our stories.
Teachers and reporters were more reticent. But after our stories ran, we heard from a few educators who worried that we were encouraging overzealous administrators to go on a witch-hunt and students to make false accusations. This is certainly something to watch. In our stories, the two major teacher unions - the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association -- noted that while this issue should be looked at seriously, there are many, many good teachers out there. We don't dispute that.
That said, my AP colleagues and I would encourage reporters across the country to doggedly pursue this important issue. If we learned anything, it's that dealing with the issue of teacher sexual misconduct, honestly and openly, is key.
For this reason, I'd strongly advise any reporter investigating sexual misconduct in a school system or state to cast a wide net when asking for state disciplinary records. Many states also have case files on individual teachers, which can sometimes be released, depending on state law, so it's worth asking.

From there, checking out each case requires patience, persistence and a willingness to dig through court and police records - often most easily accessed in person. Disciplined teachers and school administrators are often tight-lipped. But court transcripts can provide background and quotable material when they won't comment.

Links to Stories:

Day 1 (including a list of findings): http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2007-10-20-teachermisconduct_N.htm

Sidebar: http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2007-10-20-teachermisconductsidebar_N.htm?loc=interstitialskip

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Day 2: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/21/AR2007102100573.html

Sidebar: http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2007-10-21-abusegender_N.htm

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Day 3: http://blog.oregonlive.com/oregonianextra/2007/10/day_three_of_teacher_sex_abuse.html


Sidebar: http://www.dnj.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071023/NEWS01/710230302

 

Article originally appeared on Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media (http://hechinger.tc.columbia.edu/).
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