Corrupt teachers

Corruption in education starts with the teacher. Since a teacher has absolute power as far as the grade of a student is concerned, the temptation to be corrupt is great. This is a small but significant example of how absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The most blatant of such behavior is, of course, sexual harassment. There are teachers (admittedly, very few) that demand sexual favors in exchange for giving high or even just passing final grades to students. The sexual favors may range from simple tolerance of sexist remarks (“you look sexy today”) to lunch dates to what Philippine English calls “chancing” to actual intercourse. Sexual harassment is a criminal offense, but it takes a young student extraordinary courage to file charges against a teacher that could, with no one else asking for justification, give her or him a failing mark.

Not related to lust but to greed is the more common practice of teachers asking students to pay for a field trip. A typical field trip requires a rental bus, admission tickets, and meal expenses. Too many administrators ignore such field trips, because they involve a lot of tedious accounting, often with non-official receipts, and focus instead on watching their backs by asking parents to sign accident waiver forms.

Individual teachers take advantage of this administrative laziness. I know of many cases where teachers charged students what seemed like reasonable amounts, then either got commissions from bus operators or restaurants, or just pocketed the difference between what was collected and what was spent. The amounts involved are not huge, but relative to what teachers make, they add considerably to take-home pay.

More abstract but just as corrupt is the practice of some teachers, particularly on the university level, to make money from their own textbooks in their classes.

There is a gray area here, however. In the United States, where requiring one’s own textbook is condemned as unethical, there is no justification for using one’s own textbook in one’s classroom, because there are dozens of other textbooks to choose from. In the Philippines, because of the scarcity of textbooks, teachers can often validly claim that theirs is the only textbook available. (To say that theirs is the best textbook available is not a matter of corruption, but a matter of the cardinal sin of pride.)

I have no brief against teachers using their own textbooks in their own classes in the Philippines. I do it myself when there is no other textbook on the market or, more often, when my textbook is adopted by my school. The corruption enters when teachers make money (outside of the royalties to which they are legally and morally entitled) by doing actual selling or physically bringing the textbooks into the classrooms and collecting the money from students. More often than not, the money paid by students is more than what the teacher paid for the books, because authors get their own books at a discount.

To remove all doubts about making extralegal money off textbooks, author-teachers can simply direct students to campus or commercial bookstores. In the case of field trips, administrators can make students pay to school cashiers or, better, can include the costs of field trips in the miscellaneous fees collected at the start of a schoolyear.

Part of urban legend (okay, maybe it is not always just urban legend) is the image of the public schoolteacher selling food or dry goods inside the classroom. Unlike store customers that can always walk away and not buy anything, students feel forced to buy anything their teacher sells them. Even if the selling is for a good cause (such as a church raffle), a teacher taking money from students is still corrupt.

Even more of an urban legend (it does happen, though very rarely) is the teacher that sleeps her or his way to the top of the campus ladder.

Finally, in private schools, even in the most prestigious ones, there are teachers that, in effect, bribe their students to put high marks on Student Evaluation Forms. The bribery takes many forms. Some teachers give very high grades just before the evaluation period (typically, in the middle of a term). Some threaten students with failing grades should the teacher herself or himself fail in the evaluation. Some actually prepare very well for their lessons before evaluation but just bum off afterwards.

The old adage that it is not what teachers say but what they do that influences young students still holds true today. When they see that some teachers can be bribed by money, sex, or ego massage, students grow up thinking that such exploitative or manipulative behavior is ethical. When they get out of school, these students naturally behave the way their wayward teachers behaved. (To be continued)

MERRY CHRISTMAS! April 17, 6 B.C., is said by astrophysicists to be the real date when Jesus was born. Today, let us say “Happy Birthday” to the greatest teacher of all.