Yes, it's true this teacher wrote on Facebook that she wished her fifth grade students DEAD, but the comment was only meant for her friends to see, and hey, just because she hates them doesn't mean she can't teach them...so it's OK. Right, Judge?
New York Judge Barbara Jaffe disagrees with me on the issue I discussed here regarding Natalie Munroe, the elementary school teacher who still has her job despite professing her contempt and dislike for her elementary students and their parents on her blog. Thanks to Jaffe, Christine Rubino, whose online comments about her students were infinitely worse, has won a court challenge to her firing from her job teaching at PS 203 in Brooklyn, New York. The judge is wrong, and I am right. The judge is also a fool.
Imagine: last March, the day after a 12-year-old Harlem schoolgirl drowned during a class trip to a Long Island beach, Rubino posted a vicious rant about her fifth-graders on her Facebook page. “After today,” she wrote, ” I’m thinking the beach is a good trip for my class. I hate their guts.”
A Facebook friend quickly asked, “Wouldn’t you throw a life jacket to little Kwami?” Kwami was the child who drowned. The 38-year teacher replied: “No I wouldn’t for a million dollars.”
Naturally, her words leaked beyond her Facebook page, and she was fired. She should have been fired. No parent should have to send a child to be taught by a woman who posts that she hates her students’ guts on the web. No child should be entrusted to a teacher who describes homicidal fantasies about her students to Facebook friends. Her professionalism is suspect; her judgment is suspect; her fairness is suspect; her maturity is suspect. She is untrustworthy. She has no business in the class room.
But Judge Jaffe can’t comprehend that. In forcing the school to take back a hateful, irresponsible teacher, she ruled that Rubino did not mean to cause her students actual injury and the remarks did not hinder her ability to teach. I’d like to see Judge Jaffe make public comments about how she hates the guts of a defendant and his lawyer in a criminal case before her, and then see how long she stays in charge of that case. Judicial ethics would presume that her comments indicated that she could not be trusted to judge someone fairly whom she hated or said she hated. But Jaffe thinks teaching is different, although,like judging, it requires objectivity, fairness, compassion, respect and trust.
That is, if Judge Jaffe thinks at all. Her decision is a disgrace, and a slap in the face to Rubino’s students and their parents, who should hold their kids out of school until they find a way to have them taught by someone who won’t wish them dead every time they displease her. After that, they can shift their focus to Judge Jaffe, and see if there is a way to get a blatant Ethics Dunce off the bench.
Ethics Alarms 
I’m trying to stop hyperventilating long enough to hope that the school will be pressured from outrage from parents and the public to appeal this stupid judge’s decision, that an sane appellate court will reverse the decision, and that the judge will be removed from the bench. And people wonder why our schools have gone to s—!!! Between the bad teachers and those who enable them to stay there, it’s no wonder! I mean no disrespect to the scores of dedicated, intelligent, caring educators out there. They just seem to be getting more scarce by the day. And they are, unfortunately, losing the respect of many when they are lumped into the category of “school teachers” because of these poor examples that hit the news every day.
To interested blogger: I agree that teachers are losing the respect of many Americans. I hear the wrath of people every time I check out a blog and some teacher has committed another heinous crime. But keep in mind that there are close to 4 million teachers in this country in public and private schools. You could just as easily point to examples of parents who do egregious things to their own flesh and blood and give the rest of their namesake a bad reputation.
I no longer believe this…that is, I no longer believe that the profession is just fine and we distort reality by highlighting the negatives. Not with whole school districts in massive cheating scandals; not with the declining levels of education. The profession is in serious trouble and these incidents of misconduct are just outward signs of it. The entire profession is corrupt and lacks professionalism and competent oversight, and the fact that it is so difficult to fire teachers in many systems is a part of the problem.
What Brook says is true, Jack, but only as far as she goes. You’re right, too. Time and again- and on all levels of education- the stark evidence of institutionalized malfeasance is just plain overwhelming.
I can forgive a teacher who occasionally lets loose from her frustration with her students. There is a lot for public school teachers to be frustrated about- particularly if they ARE dedicated as per the “old school” of professionalism. But in this woman’s case- to rant about letting kids die… and just after one tragically HAS- reveals a mentality completely unsuited (and likely dangerous) for a woman with her kind of authority.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the judge ruled in that manner merely to avoid a conflict with NYC’s notoriously powerful teachers union. If so, then that’s a double strike against the judge as well.
I choose to believe that the entire profession is NOT corrupt and lacking professionalism and competent oversight. I believe the problem is two-fold. 1 – the unions are too powerful and and incompetent teachers are kept who should be fired and 2 – the budgets for most school departments have been cut to the point that the tools necessary for learning have become almost non-existent in many cases. It makes my head spin when I read about schools where children are sharing ancient text-books, 2-4 per child, and can’t take them home to study/do home-work. The quality of public schools in many states is directly related to the wealth of the individual community and whether or not that community chooses to/has the ability to fund beyond the going tax rate and state/federal dollars to ensure better than minimal “standards” of education. The problem is that this country has made a CHOICE to NO LONGER VALUE EDUCATION. In my small community, we hire and retain teachers that, for the most part, rival those in elite prep schools. It’s a private school education in public school. We had 6 students get into Harvard early decision. We also pay for this, not in private school tuition, but in the highest real estate taxes and real estate prices in our state, making it one of the most expensive places to live in the country. And this is just WRONG. Every child in America should be entitled to the same quality education. But I don’t think you could pay our fine teachers enough to go and teach in a failing inner-city school who’s administrators show, by their inaction, that they don’t give a hoot, and where there aren’t enough books for each child, just because they care about educating children. That’s why the quality of teachers in those failing schools will never improve until changes happen from the top-down and the funds are in place to provide learning environments that actually respect the children they are supposed to teach.
I have school teachers in the family myself! I’d add that, overall, never have American taxpayers paid more to public schools and derived so little from their money. As I’ve often said, 50 years ago, American schools were the envy of the world… and for much less financial effort. Politicians, unions and self-seeking “educators” have sucked the citizens dry with their repeated usurpations, vast projects, corrupt contractors and all to the tune of “it’s for the children”. But it’s not for the children, as the results show. It’s for the officials and their hangers-on. As with so many other once renown national institutions, public education has become a racket.
Yes – but there are also cost increases that simply cannot be blamed on incompetent teachers or their arguably corrupt unions. Health insurance costs have spun out of control – and funds that once went into the classrooms must now be used to pay these costs, often for teachers who have already retired. Politicians need to do something to fix the problem with the high cost of healthcare for ALL Americans, which would have the benefit of easing the school budgets of municipalities at the same time. 50 years ago, school budgets weren’t decimated with the costs of special needs education and the woefully inadequate reimbursement rates from state and federal government to fund these extraordinary costs. Teachers and unions can’t be blamed for these costs, either. Building new schools that are ridiculously expensive instead of providing quality education is a misguided waste of public funds – but the problem doesn’t lie with the teachers there, either. Again it goes back to corrupt and/or incompetent public officials. So while I agree that there are too many teachers who simply should not be teaching, I do not agree that they bear the entire blame for the lack of quality education in our schools today.
I never said the profession was just fine and I did not intend to insinuate that it is. There are a number of issues it has. But consider that the “bad” teachers we hear about on the news tend to be sexual perverts or violent, or guilty of impulsive venting, regarding their frustrations. While there may be some correlation with those in the other camp that are incompetent due to having poor academic skills, training and being dim bulbs; they are not the same. Mr. Berndt, the sick elementary teacher who took the photos, may have been an outstanding teacher for all we know. The public hears these sordid stories and also sees the dearth of academic skills our students graduate with, and tend to lump them together. I suppose the encapsulating feature that wraps these together is, as you said, “competent oversight.”
The principal or head teacher used to be the top teacher, or one who had proven their skills in the classroom to the point where they were considered leaders. That is no longer true. Most of my principals were former elementary school teachers who were not even qualified to teach classes at the secondary level. They had taught a few years of “see spot run.” and now they were running things. You do not even need to have classroom experience now to become an administrator.
My perspective is that it was changes in culture that drove us here. That is, the basic premise that kids go to school to learn, was increasingly eroded by societal dysfunction, ie. breakdown in traditional authority like family and church; plus consumerism, greater autonomy for youth, feminized environment. This led to greater issues in the classroom as students rebelled against the traditional model. Hence we have all the progressive wonders of “child centered learning,” the self esteem movement, increasing fear of lawsuits, etc. where teachers are asked to do more social work, baby sitting, motivating (sell their product), administrate ( deal with larger groups of students and data) in order to hopefully do their job as teachers.
So the school has now become the academic shopping mall where the principal is the store manager and deals with trying to prevent customer complaints from an increasingly, anti-intellectual society that demands morning to afternoon daycare, and high grades for sweat free participation, plus an immediate and gratifying response to any and all complaints. Anybody who has ever endeavored to make something of themselves (besides simply creating that illusion for the rest of society) knows that effort and some frustration are part of the picture, but I could tell that some of my “light weight’ principals didn’t seem to get this. For instance, I was written up for keeping a disruptive girl in my class for an extra 5 minutes at lunch because she had spent her class time socializing rather than doing the work. God forbid.
So…do you think the principals go after the complacent teachers who go about business as usual? Usually not…they go after the ones who rock the boat a bit. They don’t want complaints, and complaints come when students feet are held to the fire. Hence we now have a system where less than half our kids are academically proficient but most of them get B’s; a system where teachers are mandated to write all assignments on the board, and take another 5 mintues to then check to ensure that all their students have copied it in their school supplied, academic log, because they can’t be expected to be responsible or honest enough to do this without an adult standing over them. In sum, it is less and less about the academics (and personal responsibility) and other characteristics have come to the fore. The Onion, which parodies the current zeitgeist, has a t-shirt which encapsulates the coddling, irresponsible attitude we have endowed our young folk with: a fat chubby child’s face says “Someone needs to do something about how fat I’m getting.”
I thought I had made it plain that I was, by no means, holding incompetant or perverted teachers up as the sole reason for the collapse of public education. I could write all day on the number of factors- many interrelated- that have culminated in what has become (as I said) a racket of immense proportions.
You brought up an important one when you mentioned school building programs. Not only are many new schools flashy, overpriced and of flimsy construction regardless, but they represent corruption through construction kickbacks plus the sheer drain on the taxpayers.
“Building new schools that are ridiculously expensive instead of providing quality education is a misguided waste of public funds – but the problem doesn’t lie with the teachers there, either.”
These and other discussions in Jack’s blog about developments in schools caused me to research (last week) about a suburban high school constructed close to my home, completed in the past 5 years. My source explained that construction involved “federal waterway and wetland issues;” its total project cost was about $68.5 million, for a school designed for enrollment of 2,500 students. I agree, that’s expensive, but I don’t know enough to come to a conclusion that it’s ridiculously expensive. I would be fascinated by a chart that showed the growth in public school construction costs since WWII, overlaid with per-pupil budgets for public schools.
Flashback: back in the day, it sure was pleasant to sniff those freshly mimeographed worksheets teachers handed out! That smell needs to be added to the scent apps if it hasn’t been already, to entice older iPhoneys. (iPhoners? iPhonites?)
Jack, I think you need a new category for this level of incompetence. “Dunce”
just doesn’t seem to describe it well enough. Perhaps “ethics libertine” or something.
this judge is an idiot, this judge should be romoved.
anyone else would have been arrested and convicted of a threat. they should appeal this outrageous ruling. this judge allowed blank certified postal receipts to be used in court and she didnt even care and even helped them cover it up