The B.C. Teachers Federation has never been a big fan of a teacher disciplinary registry.

It doesn’t much like the idea that the public should have access to information about teachers who have been disciplined for misconduct, except in the most serious cases. Vice-president Irene Lanzinger was quoted as saying last month that a broad public registry is “just an invasion of people’s privacy.”

But ever since the government introduced its new legislation to establish a registry, the BCTF has been strangely, unsettlingly quiet about the issue.

The legislation looks pretty straightforward. Teachers who have violated professional standards will be disciplined, suspended or forced to quit teaching. Then their names and offences will be published on the B.C. College of Teachers website.

Having sex with students is an obvious breach. But there is a long list of other kinds of misconduct too: Hitting, threatening and intimidating students, throwing things or verbally abusing them.

Most kids never experience these abuses at school, at least not from their teachers. Most teachers take their professional responsibilities very seriously. But a few don’t.

And parents, quite reasonably, want to know who those teachers are. They want to know if they are in their children’s classrooms.

To its credit, the college does publish the names of some teachers who’ve been disciplined. But these lists are still far from complete.

Check out the college’s website and you’ll see what I mean. Most of the discipline is described in brief summaries. The majority of the teachers who’ve been disciplined remain anonymous.

It’ll tell you about the teacher who admitted to “inappropriate discipline techniques that would frighten, intimidate . . . his students”; or the teacher who “frequently yelled . . . and frequently absented herself from the classroom leaving her students unsupervised”; or the one who “engaged in an inappropriate personal and sexual relationship with a student.” But it doesn’t say who those teachers are. And it is vague about when and under what circumstances those teachers will be allowed back to work.

So the government says it’s going to fix all that with a registry that forces the college to name everyone who has been disciplined.

The problem is that every complaint gets sent first to a “preliminary committee.” The committee might decide on discipline. But if it wants to avoid naming names, it can opt to resolve complaints “informally” or simply stamp it “no further action.”

And that may explain why the BCTF has gone so uncharacteristically silent about the registry. Two-thirds of the people on the “preliminary committee” are endorsed by their union.

Critics say that’s a serious cause for worry. Not knowing if one of those few bad apples might be in your child’s classroom is a cause for concern.

But getting a false sense of security from a teacher registry whose intent can be subverted could turn out to be much worse.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 6th, 2007 at 3:50 am and is filed under Columns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.