The Teachers by Alexandra Robbins

Author:Alexandra Robbins [Robbins, Alexandra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2023-03-14T00:00:00+00:00

The “Dirty Little Secret” in Schools

When the high school bell rings, a group of slender, fashion-conscious young women race from their classrooms to grab seats at the prime lunch table. They plunk their bags on chairs to mark their territory before retrieving their lunches while one clique member remains at the table to ensure no “losers” join them. If people they don’t like—peers who don’t dress like they do, for example, or are socially awkward—try to enter their conversation, they ignore them, talk over them, or “look at them like, ‘Why are you talking to us?’ ” said Ana, among the outcasts. “They’ll be really rude. They pretend you don’t exist, or they whisper about you or make sarcastic comments, and the others snicker like, ‘Oh my god, she didn’t even realize we were being obnoxious.’ ”

The scenario might be business as usual for students in a school cafeteria. Except that when it actually happened daily in New York, the dozen or so clique members were teachers in their late twenties, and the table was the only one in the staff lounge.

Expert Jo Blase, a University of Georgia research professor emerita, calls it “the terrible, dark, dirty little secret” of education: Clique hostilities and bullying among educators exist in schools, even at schools that spend money on programs to combat these behaviors among students, even when student anti-bullying posters line the halls. Nearly three-quarters of teachers report that they’ve observed workplace bullying. A 2019 study even reported that one year in Michigan, about the same percentage of surveyed K–12 staff were bullied by adults as K–12 students were bullied by peers.

Approximately a quarter of all calls to the Workplace Bullying Institute come from educators, second in frequency only to health-care professionals. In Europe, too, education is one of the fields with the highest frequency of workplace bullying, particularly verbal abuse. This behavior does not characterize the majority of educators, many of whom are drawn to teaching because they are compassionate, caring people. But there is something about being back in school buildings, surrounded by student social hierarchies, that seems to cause some adults to regress.

The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) defines workplace bullying as “repeated, unreasonable actions of individuals (or a group) directed toward an employee (or a group of employees), which are intended to intimidate, degrade, humiliate or undermine, or which create a risk to the health or safety of the employee(s).” Administrators and staff have engaged in a wide range of behaviors that fall under this umbrella, including socially isolating teachers from peers or communication loops; spreading rumors, false information, or malicious gossip; publicly humiliating coworkers in front of colleagues and/or students; setting colleagues up to fail; attempting to ruin a reputation, failing to correct false information, or making personal character attacks; unfairly criticizing; name-calling, yelling, and other forms of verbal abuse; showing favoritism or nepotism; making threats; administrators setting rules about the friends teachers can have and the clothes they wear; using physical violence; and other attempts to frustrate, wear down, pressure, or provoke a target.

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