Under Attack
On November 1, 2013, Teaching Tolerance (TT) posted a blog by an anonymous contributor titled “Teachers Can Be Bullied Too.” The author describes being screamed at by her department head in front of colleagues and kids and having her employment repeatedly threatened. She also tells of the depression and anxiety that plagued her following each incident.
To be honest, we debated posting it. “Was this really a TT issue?” we asked ourselves. Would our readers care about the misfortune of one teacher? How common was this experience anyway?
The answer became apparent the next day when the comments section exploded. A popular TT blog might elicit a dozen or so total comments; readers of this blog left dozens upon dozens of long, personal comments every day—and they continued to do so. “It happened to me,” “It’s happening to me,” “It’s happening in my department. I don’t know how to stop it.”
This outpouring was a surprise, but it shouldn’t have been. A quick Web search revealed that educators report being bullied at higher rates than professionals in almost any other field. (Nursing is also at the top.) A second search put us in touch with the Workplace Bullying Institute (WBI) and its cofounder, Gary Namie, who for years has worked with teachers seeking support and relief from bullying. Namie and WBI offer a theory for the high concentration of bullying in education and nursing.
“The professionals who get into these fields [have] a pro-social orientation,” he says. “They’re helpers, right? For teachers, they’re really development specialists. … They’re not political animals. They have their back turned to the politics, which of course, then opens them up to this attack. Because of their goodness in a way, because of their motivation. This is why they get targeted.”
Namie’s description of who gets targeted matches up with the identity of our anonymous blogger and with many of the commenters: veteran or high-achieving teachers who cultivate strong relationships with students and families. So why these teachers, we asked? Wouldn’t they be the ones colleagues and administrators would want to keep around?
Motives“Bully targets are threatening to a perpetrator. They pose a threat in some way, usually because of teaching excellence or focus on children, or adherence to the mission or their principles,” Namie explains. “This just agitates the crap out of somebody who is unscrupulous and sadistic. They can’t stand it.”
Karen Horwitz was an award-winning English teacher who experienced a stress-related health crisis and left education after suffering alleged bullying by her principal. After fighting an extended court battle (her case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where it was dismissed), Horwitz founded an organization called the National Association for the Prevention of Teacher Abuse (NAPTA). Based on over a decade of work supporting bullied teachers, she asserts that the motives behind teacher abuse fall into two camps.
“[Some people] are doing it because they’re power hungry and they like the feeling that they can come in there … and torment a bunch of people. It makes them feel good,” she says. “Some of them are doing it because they’re making a lot of money.”
Horwitz believes that a significant percentage of teacher bullying is related to school reform or privatization agendas (forcing out teachers who “won’t play ball”) and to attempts to cover up financial impropriety, a phenomenon she calls “white chalk crime” (also the title of her book). Low-income communities and communities of color, she says, are particularly vulnerable.
“That offends me more than anything,” Horwitz says. “That they would take these really good, solid … teachers and abuse them out of teaching when those kids need them more than anything.”
While experts may debate the motives, one thing is clear: The hierarchical structure of many schools and districts combined with the isolation many teachers experience due to the nature of the job can create an environment where bullying behavior can easily go unchecked—with devastating consequences for the target of the behavior and for the kids they teach.
Tactics and Effects
According to the numerous experts we spoke with and many of the commenters on our blog, the experiences of targeted teachers are, to use Namie’s words, “almost prototypical.” The Under Attack | Teaching Tolerance: