Wednesday, March 08, 2006

More scary teacher stories

A couple months ago I set up a Google alert for "teacher guilty" and each day Google mails me a summary of news articles, many of which are about teachers who are accused of various crimes. Today was a banner day. There were 21 different news articles. Some of them were for different countries. And some of these articles were about someone else being accused of a crime and a teacher being mentioned in the article. But most of them were about teachers who shouldn't be teaching.

As I've mentioned before my real problem with scary teachers in the public school system is not that there are instances of evil teachers, but that so often the teacher keeps teaching. Maybe there isn't enough evidence to send a bad teacher to jail, but if there is reasonable doubt, then for the benefit of the students, the teacher shouldn't be allowed to teacher.

Here are some of the more serious articles:

WorldNetDaily has a long list of female teachers who had sex with students, or are accused of having sex with students.

The Charlotte Observer has a scary opening line: "Former Huntersville middle school teacher Jimmie Grubbs may have been committing sex crimes for years, authorities said Tuesday, with police looking into more than 15 possible victims." Three adults came forward to say he had molested them in the 1980s.

NBC6 news reports about the double standard of how female teachers often get much lighter terms than male teachers. Down in Florida Debra Lafave admitted having sex with a 14 year old boy. But currently it doesn't appear she'll be spending any time in jail. The closing of the article was: "There's no question that there's a double standard here," said Daniel Ruth of the Tampa Tribune. "If a fabulously handsome teacher had sexual relations or sexually assaulted a student in his Class, do you think an argument would be made that he shouldn't go to prison because he's too buff?"

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