Welcome to the EDTC Blogsite!

EDTrainingCenter.com blogs about training and certification trends and requirements for educators and administrators.

Welcome to the new EDTrainingCenter.com blogsite.  This site is dedicated to all thoughts, articles, discussions, and happenings in the world of training and certification for educators and administrators.  Rather than waste a whole blog post talking about what we are GOING to say, we thought we’d get right in and start offering you some food for thought right away.  Many of our posts will be written by our Program Director, but we may feature other authors at times as well.  We hope to keep you entertained and informed and keep you up to date on the changes in educational training and certification.

This morning I came across the folllowing article: Senator Anthony Williams wants light to shine on teachers’ bad behavior

The first thing that struck me about the article was the terrible title.  When you read the actual article you realize that the tone set by this title is not consistent with the actual story at all…but then again, the title drew me in to read more.  I realize that the media needs to make things sensational in order to get ‘eyeballs’ as they say in the biz, but throwing teachers under the bus yet again seems a little unnecessary.

Regardless, this article raised a lot of interesting questions and I highly recommend reading or at least skimming it.  It seems that more and more states are looking to better track the criminal or abuse records of educators (among other professionals) from school district to school district.  This push comes on the heels of incidents in which students were abused at one school district (or there were suspicions) and the educator was allowed to move on to a new district and continue the abuse.

Background Checks May Have 'Gaps'

There is nothing suggesting that this was intentional, it was more a factor of the new district having no knowledge or information about prior incidents at other districts.  It seems like that wouldn’t be so hard to know but you’d be surprised.  Even complete criminal records can be hard to obtain.  Some states don’t release their state criminal database to other states.  Some background checks don’t include Federal crimes.  Some background checks are state-specific and won’t tell you if a person committed a crime in a neighboring state!

This is the challenge of DATA as IBM always likes to remind us.  Though it seems like keeping and tracking data should be easy with the technology of today, the fact is that the transition from paper-based data systems to electronic data systems is painfully slow (ask the medical industry).  In the meantime there are gaps and redundancies and noise that make it harder to track ‘bad guys’ than you may have expected.

But don’t expect school districts or states to sit back and do nothing!  There are changes to child abuse reporting laws pending in 25 states (according to the article) which means this is an issue that ‘has legs’.

     Expect to have to update your training and knowledge in the area of Child Abuse Identification in the next couple of years.

[tags] EDTrainingCenter.com, training, certification, online learning, e-learning, substitute teacher training, introductory teacher training, student safety, child abuse identification, background checks [/tags]