Teachers sometimes resign when they don’t want to. Why do they do this? I can’t answer for all others, but I can offer insight into one reason innocent teachers sometimes resign. It’s like this . . .
Once a teacher is tenured, the Missouri Teacher Tenure Act protects them against arbitrary firing. They can’t be fired without first being accused of wrongdoing. But that is all the protection it provides. As long as the school district formally accuses a teacher and then waits 30 days before firing them, the law is satisfied. That’s all it requires: accuse, then wait 30 days to fire them. The law doesn’t require that the allegations be true. It doesn’t require any evidence. It doesn’t require any verification or hearing. It presumes that school districts will be honest. The only grounds a terminated teacher has for appealing is if the district got those simple procedures wrong when firing them. And the district keeps an attorney constantly at hand to ensure they carefully comply with the basic letter of the law while they ignore the obvious intent of the law.
When I was charged with wrongdoing, the assistant superintendent informed me that in his 18 years working at the district office, not a single employee had survived being formally accused. Every single one of them was ultimately fired or resigned. He recommended I just resign before even being accused. He explained that if I waited to be fired, no school district would hire me again. I presume that is not entirely true. I could possibly move my family to some desperate, distant, isolated community and take a low-paying teaching position there. But for practical purposes, that is out of the question. So for practical purposes, he is right. A fired teacher is a liability to any future school district. If the teacher does something wrong in the new school district, the district can be sued for having taken on someone they knew was a problem (even if the previous firing was obviously fraudulent). So no teacher who wants to remain a teacher can afford to be fired.
When I received my Notice of Deficiency, the formal accusation that starts the 30-day clock after which I can be fired, one of the charges against me was that I had acted “unprofessionally.” District policy requires that you always act professionally. I was warned that I must never act unprofessionally again. I was further warned that any single instance of violating any one of the numerous policies they claimed I had violated could be grounds for immediate termination.
“Wait,” I said. “‘Unprofessional’ is highly subject to interpretation, right?”
“Yes,” was the reply.
“So if I do a single thing you don’t like,” I continued, “you are telling me that I should expect you will characterize it as unprofessional and fire me immediately, right.”
“Yes,” was again the reply.
So . . . I could continue working. I could be the best employee they had ever seen. But if they and I ever had a difference of perspective on anything, I could then immediately be fired.
And then I could never teach again. Or I could just admit that they held all the cards and promptly resign.
Good, honest people might think that I am exaggerating the case a little. Surely it wasn’t quite that straight-forward. Surely they were just trying to get me to behave, trying to put a stop to my former misconduct. As long as I did what I was supposed to do, I had nothing to worry about, right?
In my case, there was more to it than that. First, they promised to put me under continuous supervision, all day, every day, as much as they could. And given that there was a principal and four assistant principals available to monitor me, I could expect to be under constant supervision. There was no chance of my not doing something they could object to.
Recall the famous boast of Joseph Stalin’s chief of secret police: “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.”
You can always find evidence when doing so suits your agenda. Additionally, they suspended the team I was coaching for a full year. The five dozen plus kids who were part of that program would go a full year without competing again unless I resigned. (And we had just won two consecutive national championships.) That was a clever trick on their part: using my love for the kids as leverage against me.
Again honest people might think I am stretching the story. I can’t convince you otherwise. You have to see these things firsthand, or take the time to examine the evidence more extensively, before you can accept that the district would behave this dishonestly. It was absolutely surreal to experience it all as it played out. I’ll just hear share a couple of small bits of evidence here to invite your faith in this narrative.
First, the school district’s attorney informed my attorney at the very outset of my suspension that the school had ALREADY decided to give me a Notice of Deficiency and return me to work. At the time, we thought this was good news.
But we then learned, from the assistant superintendent, that no one ever survives a Notice of Deficiency. This means that they had already decided I must go, well before they even started their sham investigation, decided what their accusations would be, informed me of their charges, invited my response, etc.! Second, when they finally provided me the Notice of Deficiency and I pointed out multiple charges that were so absolutely false that I couldn’t even begin to guess what they were talking about, their reply was “It doesn’t matter, as long as you don’t do it again.”
What kind of honest investigatory or disciplinary procedure includes “it doesn’t matter whether any of the charges against you are true”? It was obvious that they didn’t care; they were simply following state law in ensuring they charged me with something so that they could thereafter fire me (or coerce my resignation).
If you previously presumed that innocent teachers don’t resign, I hope you now know better.
If you previously thought that a resignation while under investigation was acknowledgment of guilt, I hope you now have new perspective.
If you previously believed that truth always triumphs over error, I hope you are beginning to see the prospect that it does not.
If you previously thought those who run our public institutions have more integrity than this, I hope you are now more enlightened.
I kind of hate having to disrupt your innocence. It is nice thinking of people as honest and of our institutions as just. The reality is that the world is a bit clumsier, or perhaps dirtier, than that. Even good people sometimes behave badly. Even good systems sometimes fail.
Major Danny Cazier, former JROTC instructor, Ozark High School
One response to “Why teachers resign (Guest Column)”
People who whine about others not having integrity, insinuating that they themselves have a lot of integrity, are usually the most insufferable people and are often the biggest liars. Get a life, Danny Cazier.