The problem of how we handle accusations in public school can be handled very similarly to how accusations are handled in the Catholic Church.   I don’t know if you are aware, but since 2010, more than 9 out of every 10 new accusations are found not to be credible.  My favorite debunked accusation had the accused priest over 100 miles away on live television at the time of the alleged abuse.  That’s quite the alibi.  The way the Catholic Church handles accusations is that the priest is removed from active service until the accusation can be deemed credible or not.  If it is not credible, the priest is still punished by being moved to another part of the diocese since people won’t believe he’s innocent, even if he was on another continent at the time.  If it is deemed credible (which usually requires the priest to be in the correct locale and not easily proven to be doing something else), the priest is removed from public service entirely.  If the priest can definitively prove his innocence, he MIGHT be allowed back into service, but is never allowed around kids again, no matter that he was proven innocent, because it MIGHT have happened, even if it didn’t.  Catholics are still accused of being too light on the priests because there are errors in the application of these principles and people refuse to believe that priests could ever be innocent.

California is doing nothing significantly different than the rest of the nation.  After learning of these facts years ago, I was further convinced that my children did not need to be in the public school system.  I sometimes wonder if I am actually doing a good enough job teaching them, but frankly, if a 38% sexual harassment/abuse rate is not a reason to pull my kids from that system, what would be?

One of my favorite authors for junk reading has a murder mystery that is solved because a teacher installs a camera pointed at his desk so that he can never be accused of fooling around with students since he will always have an impartial witness on the camera. I thought that sounded like a great idea, at least in a one-party consent state.

False accusations destroy lives all the time, and especially sexual abuse/harassment accusations. There are very few ways to combat this, as innocents are hurt either way. In truth, the distance between victim blaming and “believe all victims” is very short and nearly everyone, at least of those I’ve met, suffers from both. One false accusation moves people to victim blaming quickly, whereas one badly hurt person who was denied justice moves to “believe all victims”.

I think the middle ground involves a lot of work from both sides in this. First, if a person falsely accuses someone, they need to incur a harsh punishment. Now there needs to be an attempt made to understand a false accusation that comes from a misunderstanding rather than a malicious accusation. If a kid thinks the teacher said to “show your boobs” rather “show your food” when there is a kid with a life threatening peanut allergy in the lunch line, this is a simple misunderstanding. A kid who wants to get out of that F she’s getting for not doing her research paper, on the other hand is malicious.

Second, teachers need to be held to a high degree of behavior in and out of the classroom. Teachers should not be doing things that could get misconstrued and if they act outside a reasonably strict morality clause, this is not the profession for them.It used to be that teachers had to be immaculate. You couldn’t have a teacher who drank. You couldn’t have a teacher who was pregnant. If a teacher was found fornicating or even worse, adultery, they were removed. This kept the teachers’ noses pretty clean. While I don’t know if we need to have quite that strict of regulations, requiring good character in a teacher and making most significant ethical failures to be a firing offense would rather quickly make things better.

My hometown had a teacher who got pregnant with the principal’s kid about a decade ago. The principal’s wife, another teacher, got mad. The pregnant teacher’s husband got mad. Lots of unpleasantness and unprofessional behavior followed. The pregnant adultress moved in with her adultery partner and the cuckolded spouses were cast aside publicly. This not only made major town gossip, but every kid in the school knew the basic details. Because of a lack of morality clause, nothing could be done and everyone kept their jobs. My mother told me she thought she had ended up in a soap opera, for the amount of drama this caused in that small town.

It’s easy to pick examples that show extremes, but really, working on policy that moves towards more ethically appropriate teacher behavior in and out of the class, as well as strictly punishing malicious false accusations would decrease the instances that could occur. Sexual harassment/assault by teachers continues to rise, according to some studies. It is time we consider how to stop this and, since it has become such a cancer, drastic action is needed before it kills the whole system.