The Teachers Are Blowing Their Whistles!

Under ACT law, workers who recklessly fail to prevent behaviour that causes serious harm to another can be fined $220,000 and jailed for seven years.

Just imagine what a difference it would make to the lives of Queensland teachers if this was law and enforced in Queensland.

At the moment bully principals seem to be supported and protected by other administrators.

A law like this would pressure them to put a stop to the bullying.

Of course the law would need to be enforced - and that would take leadership.

Could we lobby local members in the run-up to the state election?

Greens push for bullying watchdog, Markus Mannheim, public service reporter, 7 November 2011 : http/www.canberratimes.com.au/news/local/news/general/greens-push-for-bullying-watchdog/2348676.aspx

When I was in Brisbane last November I met a few of the teachers who have been in contact with me through this website.

I was worried about confidentiality - teachers tell me that they are regularly warned at staff meetings that they must not speak to the media - so I arranged to meet the teachers individually.

But, as it happened, two teachers were chatting and realised that they had both 'set up' meetings with me, and they arranged to have a joint meeting. Then another teacher was also invited.

Before this group meeting I had my doubts - but actually it was amazingly good.

Two of us discovered that we had worked with the same dysfunctional principal, just a few years apart!

Others swapped ideas on how to make a living after you have been driven out of teaching.

It was a wonderful experience.

Then the next day I met a man who told me that he had had to fight off two other men who also wanted to come along to talk about workplace bullying at their school.

So I have been wondering ever since how I could set up a bigger meeting in Brisbane for teachers.

A time when they could talk safely about what is going on at their schools.

And then I saw this video -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y63xPm32v4

A group of American teachers got together and talked about their jobs - but with bags over their heads!

Now wouldn't that be amazing!

I will let you know when I will next be in Brisbane.

Maybe we can organise a "Bag Lady Teachers" meeting in Brisbane.

Do you think the press should be invited?

Women in Iran are treated bady.

We all know that.

We often read about it in our newspapers.

And we will soon see a film about it - The Stoning of Soroya M.

So we women in Australia are all fully aware that women in these other countries are treated badly.

And that we are lucky to live in Australia.

Because women in Iran can be falsely accused of adultery.

• But Queensland classroom teachers can also be falsely accused of more or less anything by children, parents and principals.

An Iranian man may make a false allegations against his wife because he wants to get rid of her so that he can marry a younger woman

• And a Queensland principal may make a false allegation against a classroom teacher because he (or she) prefers to work with younger, cheaper, more easily manipulated contract teachers.

An Iranian man may blackmail the local mullah.

• Just as "investigators" are rewarded with money or promotions for conducting faux "investigations" into the abuse of Queensland classroom teachers.

Iranian women are sentenced to death by stoning.

• And Australian classroom teachers have their mental and physical health destroyed. Then they are driven out of work and into an impoverished retirement.

In Iran "Adultery" can simply mean smiling at another man.

• And in Queensland, classroom teachers can be put into punishment programs by principals who have never actually seen them teach. The principal can just claim that they are feeling mysterious "concerns" about the teachers. The principal's "concerns" are not explained. Because then the classroom teacher would be able to respond. The classroom teacher is simply told "you are not going to talk your way out of this".
• That's 'Natural Justice'. In Queensland.

Iranian women beg "don't kill me", "don't kill me" as they are buried in holes up to their neck.

And then stoned to death.

• Just as Queensland classroom teachers beg the authorites - the Queensland Teachers' Union, the District Director, the Director-General of Education, the Minister of Education, the Premier, the Ombudsman, the Crime and Misconduct Commission - for justice.
• And the Queensland Teachers' Union, the District Director, the Director-General of Education, the Minister of Education, the Premier, the Ombudsman, the Crime and Misconduct Commission all seem to turn a blind eye to what is going on.
• They passively facilitate the abuse.

The Koran makes no mention of stoning but it has become part of Sharia law in some islamic countries.

• Just as making false allegations against a classroom teacher and then driving the teacher into ill health and out of work is not part of the official policy of Education Queensland. But it seems to have become a common practice.

So, Queensland women classroom teachers, watch The Stoning of Soroya M and reflect on how fortunate you are to be living and working in a civilised country.

• But then consider - how often do you read about the abuse of Queensland classroom teachers in The Courier-Mail and The Australian?
• Not often.
• Why?
• Why is it OK for reporters to write about the abuse of women in Iran in Australian newspapers, but not OK for them to write about the abuse of Queensland classroom teachers?
• Why is this abuse being swept under the carpet?
• Why are so many young women teachers being "sucked into" abusive workplaces?
• Why is there so little change?
• Because Queensland classroom teachers are suffering so much workplace abuse that it is not even considered to be "news"?

• The Stoning of Soroya M by Freidoune Sahebjam has been made into a film which will be released nationally on May 27.
• The Stoning of Soroya M was discussed in Heads Up, Edited by Gary Callaghan, The Weekend Australian Magazine, May 15-16 2010.

Tonight I phoned a male teacher who had contacted me through the website.

Once again I found myself speaking with an intelligent, rational male teacher who had been driven out of work.

• Why are intelligent, rational male teachers being driven out of work in Queensland schools?

In about 2004 I was shown some unpublished research that suggested that male secondary teachers felt safest at work.

Female secondary teachers felt less safe than male secondary teachers, but still felt pretty safe.

Male primary teachers felt reasonably safe.

But female primary teachers felt very much at risk of workplace abuse.

These findings seemed to be logical at the time.

But nowadays I am often contacted by male secondary teachers, particulary men teaching maths, science or computing - areas in which there is supposed to be a shortage of teachers.

These male teachers describe to me a long chain of events in which they say that they tried to do the "right thing" - what seemed to them to be the logical and rational thing - and yet they find that have been driven into ill health and out of work.

• I have to conclude that male and female teachers who think in a very logical, rational manner - teachers who have the intelligence to understand the Departmental policies and who follow the Departmental policies correctly - are particularly vulnerable to workplace abuse.

Other groups that I feel may be at particular risk of workplace abuse are -

•  Male ( and to a lesser extent, female ) teachers who were born and educated overseas - in England, America or New Zealand.

Because they have so little experience of corruption.

And because they take the Education Department inservices seriously.

Aussie teachers seem to know that the in-services are purely ceremonial.

Aussie teachers seem to know the real policies.

I remember when I first began teaching in Queensland, I worked with a teacher who was always advising me to "go with the flow" and "don't rock the boat".

Now I realise that these are the real official policies.

•  Male ( and female ) teachers who work with special needs children.

These teachers seem to be very much at risk of false allegations.

Or of being atacked by a child, injured and retired on the grounds of ill health into a life of poverty.

• The male teacher asked me to pass on two important messages to other Queensland classroom teachers -

1. He urges Queensland classroom teachers to take complaints about workplace abuse to the Queensland Industrial Relations Commission ( QIRC ).

He found that the QTU, the CMC and the Ombudsman would not help him.

But he feels that the QIRC is "outside the system".

He feels that the QIRC commissioners have integrity.

2. He advises that teachers who are outside Brisbane can access no-win-no-fee solicitors in Brisbane by phone.

He has done that himself and he found it easy.

The Australian Education Union's 2008 survey of new teachers ranks student misbehaviour before concerns about pay and class sizes, and second to workload as the chief source of concern.

Secondary teachers rank it as their No. 1 concern at 71.4 per cent.

Primary teachers rank it second at 66.1 per cent.

• New teachers say classroom violence their biggest concern, Kevin Donnelly, director of the Melbourne-based Education Standards Institute, The Courier-Mail: 16 November, 2009.

It is interesting to note the similarity between this AEU research result and The Teachers Are Blowing Their Whistles results.

Surely Education Departments must have a duty of care - to teachers who want to teach and to students who want to learn - to deal more effectively with disruptive students?

When I was in Bali recently, I noticed that many housewives were producing wonderful little items for sale to tourists - interesting headbands, hand-made dolls and toys, children's clothes, etc.

The people of Bali achieve so much because there is no employment benefit and they need to work really hard to make money.

• It made me wonder how much more Australians would achieve if there was no unemployment benefit.

And the people of Bali really value education.

When you take away the need to work, you take away the need to learn.

And children lose interest in school.

• We need to re-establish the relationship between work and money and freedom of choice.

Maybe we should consider providing unemployed people with free accommodation, shopping tokens for fruit, vegetables, basic food and basic necessities, transport tokens and free health care.

But take away their power to choose to spend taxpayers' money on junk food, smoking, gambling, drinking, etc.

This would re-establish the relationship between work, money and freedom of choice.

And children might become more interested in learning.

I have just arrived home from a Writers' conference in Ubud, Bali. The conference began with a tribute to the late WS Rendra, an Indonesian performance poet. It was an amazing and very memorable ceremony in the Pura Dalem Ubud - the Temple of the Dead. Imagine a long, winding entrance to the temple, a wide stairway lit by candles, and then hundreds of people sitting around the magnificent entrance gates to the Pura Dalem.

The Indonesians do performance poetry so well. WS Rendra protested about social injustice and during the ceremony we listened to a tape recording of him speaking to a crowd of people in a cafe. What struck me was the audience - they were listening carefully and cheering, yelling, clapping his words of protest. We do not seem to have that level of public engagement in protest in Australia.

But as I type this blog I will imagine a crowd of abused teachers all listening and cheering, yelling, howling their support for my words of protest.

Interesting points made by writers at the conference included :

• Western writers keep at arms length from any political agitation.

(A western writer made this statement. It seemed odd to me. But maybe the political control of funding grants, awards, etc. in Australia discourages writers from criticising a certain political party.)

• The people who control the words control history.

When I was younger, I believed that history concerned facts. But now I realise that what we call "history" may actually be an entirely falsified version of what was really "going on". We who know what is going on need to write it down. We need to battle against the falsification of the official histories.

• "Heroes" may be artificial constructs.
• The images - role models - projected by those in power may render the people powerless.

How often do you have doubts about the people who are given special awards?

Have you noticed that people seem to be given special awards to distract public attention away from bad things that they have done?

These horrible people are then held up as role models for us to follow.

A frog fell into a well - think Education Queensland - and the frog thought that the bottom of the well was the whole world. The frog thought that it knew everything, and believed itself to be a pretty smart frog. But to the people who were standing outside the well looking down on the frog, the frog seemed like a pretty sad character with very limited experience of the world.

• The state sponsors some forms of violence.
• Laws are used to take revenge on people that you don't like.

• Universities - and intelligent people - thrive in countries where there is doubt and reason.

Would you say that there is doubt and reason in Education Queensland?

Or just one "correct" thought?

• Writing about your experience can help you to keep your sanity - think of it as taking out the trash.

There were some bloggers at the conference and there was a session on The New Frontier - Blogging and Dissent :

• This is an on-line battle. It is a war of ideas.

• Intellectuals - think intelligent classroom teachers - have always been attacked by the "powers that be". It has always happened.

• It is important to tell your story in books as well as blogs. Books are going to last. The internet may not last.

Changing the subject slightly, thank you to those teachers who bogged while I was away. I was reading your comments with interest while I was in Ubud!

I was contacted by a few teachers (and one parent) while I was away. Today I phoned one of those people - a male teacher -  and had a chat.

He gave me permission to share this with you:

He is a 22-year veteran teacher who moved to Queensland and applied for work.

For eight years he took contracts while he waited for a permanent teaching job.

He noticed that whenever he tried to behave in what he believed to be a normal professional manner - for example, by sending poorly behaved children to the office in accordance with the school behaviour management program - his teaching contract was either immediately terminated or not renewed.

And finally he told me about his last school -

"A kid hit me and I thought, 'I know what's going to happen' "

And it did.

3000 pages of The Teachers Are Blowing Their Whistles have now been read.

If you have found this website you are probably -

• a Queensland teacher
• a student teacher
• a qualified teacher who is waiting to get a teaching position in Queensland
• a retired / resigned Queensland teacher
• a Queensland teacher who is working overseas
• an interstate or overseas teacher who is considering moving to work in Queensland
• a Queensland public servant
• a politician or political staffer with an interest in education
• a whistleblower with an interest in education

How can I be reasonably sure of this?

• Because of the links and the wording of the "google searches" that you used to find the website.

The following stats are based on the last 919 pages, read between 22 July - 27 August, 2009 -

• 76.39 % of the pages were read in Australia
• 7.83 % of the pages were read in the US.
• 4.35 % of the pages were read in the UK. 

• Teachers Stories was read 150 times.
• The Home Page was read 137 times.

These are the only two pages that are linked to other websites - to the best of my knowledge - so they act as a filter to "weed out" people with no real interest in the working conditions of Queensland teachers.

• The Behaviour Problems was read 82 times.
• The Bullying was read 77 times.
• The Remote Areas was read 72 times.
• The Pay was read 62 times.

If you accept that people would want to read about issues that are of concern to them, then the number of times that a page has been read would seem to be an indication of the level of teacher concern about that issue.

Which seems to suggest that classroom behaviour problems, workplace bullying and being sent out to work in the remote areas of Queensland are of greater concern to Queensland teachers than their low pay.

(And if you consider the high profile of pay issues at the moment, you may wonder if pay would normally be of such concern to classroom teachers.)

• The Contract Work was read 58 times.
• The Asbestos was read 48 times.
• The Curriculum was read 46 times.
• The Promotion System was read 43 times.
• The Threats was read 41 times.

The last three pages were not on the website for the full period, so they may actually be of greater concern than the results indicate  -

• The Investigations was read 28 times.
• The Marking was read 24 times.
• The False Allegations was read 24 times.

Obviously I have made a few assumptions here, but I think these results are interesting.

I would welcome comments on the conclusions that I have drawn from the stats.

The story told by the young male teacher -

http://www.theteachersareblowingtheirwhistles.com/teachersstories.htm

is interesting for so many reasons.

I had read unpublished research that suggested that women primary school teachers felt the most exposed to workplace abuse.

And that male secondary teachers felt safest at work.

But it seems that older women teachers are not the only ones being driven out of work.

My own guess would be that this young male teacher may have replaced a popular contract teacher mid-term - always a tricky situation.

And he had the deputy-principal's child in his class - another very tricky situation.

So it would seem that the risk factors for teachers could be-

• being an older woman
• replacing a popular contract teacher mid-term
• having the son or daughter of a principal or deputy-principal in your class

But, of course, what is most amazing about this young teacher's story is the way that the abuse prompted him to move to London and to a much more interesting life.

If this teacher had not been driven out of work, he would probably have been "rewarded" with a very remote posting for several years.

London looks like a good option.

In the past few weeks I have been contacted by two women teachers from northern NSW.

Both women are in their fifties and obviously very literate and intelligent.

They tell me that their work was well regarded till they were attacked.

I am wondering if there is a pattern here - are women teachers in their fifties more likely to be attacked at work?

Is this some kind of systemic economy drive?

Or are younger teachers simply easier to manipulate?

Do principals feel safer working with younger teachers?

Will there be less workplace bullying in Queensland schools when all of the intelligent, literate older teachers have retired or been driven out of work?

One teacher has contacted me by email to point out that over 30% of Queensland teachers are in non-government schools and that they also suffer workplace bullying.

But that the bullying in non-government schools is "covered-up" by school boards because they are anxious to preserve the "elite" image of their schools.

A parent of a student at a very prestigious school in WA has just contacted me with very similar concerns.

Would any other non-government teacher like to comment on this issue?