Policing The Profession

To visit the drab offices of Washington state’s Office of Professional Practices is to journey through education’s heart of darkness. There, safely stowed behind windows secured with mesh wire, sit hundreds of files documenting the alleged sins of teachers, principals, and school administrators in the state.

OPP is home to these files because it is the state agency charged with sorting through reports of misconduct by educators. It investigates offenses both small and great, which makes reading its case files something like descending through the levels of Dante’s Inferno. Most of the educators are under investigation for minor transgressions, like the caffeine-starved teacher who abandoned his class for a Starbucks run. In such cases, the accused seem more guilty of stupidity than educational malpractice.

But deeper in the files you find more heinous characters: The teacher who called students “Jew bastards” and “fish eaters.” The principal who threatened to kill his superintendent over a bad evaluation. The shop instructor who covered a sleeping student in newspaper and set the paper ablaze. And, of course, Mary Letourneau, the Washington teacher who landed on the cover of People after she slept with a 13-year-old student and bore his child.

OPP has four investigators on staff, but Adelle Nore, the chief investigator, gives all the files at least a once-over. Nore doesn’t exactly fit Hollywood’s stereotype of the cynical sleuth. At 55, she is a grandmother three times over. Her straight brown hair is cropped short, above the ears, seemingly with little regard for fashion or symmetry. In conversation, she doles out praise in generous portions, even when none is deserved.

This Barbara Bush-like image of goodness hardly seems fitting for someone who probes education’s dark side, and yet Nore is among the best in the country at what she does. After more than 15 years on the job, she’s become something of an expert in a fledgling field, as more states move to expand efforts to rid their educator corps of bad apples.

Although Nore was once a teacher, she’s not exactly guaranteed a warm welcome in school faculty lounges today. OPP’s gung-ho approach to cleaning up the profession drags too many innocent teachers through the mud, the agency’s critics claim.

Nore, however, sees her work as a service to kids and to the profession. An investigation early in her career convinced her that scouring education’s underbelly was just as important as teaching fractions. The case involved a 14-year-old Hispanic girl. Taking a makeup test one day after school, the girl finished her work and turned to find her teacher, a man, standing before her naked. When he approached, she bolted from the classroom and fled the building in tears. The teacher later admitted what he’d done and was arrested, Nore says, but the girl’s family concluded she had somehow led him on. Nore and district officials convinced the girl’s father otherwise, but the mother and the rest of the family swore they would never speak to her again.

“I always remember that case because all this kid did was go to school,” Nore says. “That’s all she did. That was really hard for me. I decided that if I’m going to investigate, this is why I’m going to investigate. This shouldn’t happen, ever.”

In most states, education law codes make at least a passing reference to the quaint-sounding notion that teachers should exemplify good “moral character” or “personal fitness.” But for years, most states did little to enforce this ideal beyond asking would-be teachers to list any felony convictions on their certificate applications.

Recently, though, some states have concluded that they must do more. Under the auspices of agencies with innocuous-sounding names like Professional Practices Services, they have mounted more aggressive and more legally based efforts to investigate the backgrounds of certificate applicants as well as alleged misconduct by veteran teachers. In California, for example, 25 investigators, lawyers, and support staff man the professional practices division, more than triple the number of a decade ago.

Some states are hiring lawyers and former law-enforcement types. This kind of legal firepower is needed, state officials say, to ensure that revocations and other certification actions go by the book in the face of an increasing number of lawsuits. “Used to be, teachers just gave up their certificates and slunk off,” says Michelle Beus, a former Utah investigator and criminal-defense attorney. No more. Last year, a Utah teacher sued the state, claiming it had mishandled her license revocation. When state officials investigated her claims, they found that rules and procedures were inconsistent and often not followed. They returned her certificate, despite her conviction for felony child abuse, but since then, the state has moved to put its revocations on firmer legal ground. And it is again moving to take away the teacher’s certificate.

The splashiest, most policelike method states use to ensure the profession’s wholesomeness is the FBI criminal-background check. More than half the states fingerprint teacher-certificate applicants for such checks, and a handful fingerprint veteran teachers, as well. FBI statistics suggest a recent boom in the popularity of such checks: In 1994, the FBI processed the fingerprints of 185,000 school employees; three years later, the number had more than doubled to 459,000.

In many states, teachers’ unions have fought off legislation authorizing such checks, arguing that they are a gross invasion of privacy. Why single out one group of professionals, the unions contend, when fingerprinting others with regular access to kids--doctors, for example--is unthinkable?

Such logic, however, matters little when horror stories about teachers with rap sheets kick up a storm of outrage. In 1996, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette dug up the criminal records of the state’s 38,000 teachers and found about 100 who had previously been charged with crimes ranging from peddling drugs to having sex with minors. Union officials contend the newspaper hyped and distorted its front-page series, but they nonetheless dropped opposition to fingerprinting veteran teachers, setting the stage for the legislation’s approval. “It was a monster story,” explains Grainger Ledbetter, former president of the Arkansas Education Association.

Adelle Nore was investigating teachers long before such work became a growth industry in education. After graduating from college in 1965, she taught junior high for five years in Alaska. But when Nore and her family moved to Seattle, she joined Washington state’s education department as a certification specialist, helping teachers and other educators navigate the route to the classroom. It was while working in the
certification office in the early 1980s that her boss gave her the job of investigating educators’
misconduct.

Nore, who had not done investigative work before, patched together some training from various police and social service agencies. But her first forays into the field taught her some valuable lessons. In an interview during an early sexual-abuse case, Nore told the alleged victim that she looked scared. The girl shot back, “That’s OK, because you look really scared, too. “

Today, hundreds of cases later, Nore is a recognized national authority on teacher-misconduct investigations. She is sharp, says Paul Longo, a California education official and chairman of the professional practices committee of the National Association of State Directors of Teacher Education and Certification, and her grandmotherly tendencies work to her advantage. “There could be no better model for an investigator,” Longo explains. “You can’t have investigators who are hardened ex-cops. Teachers won’t respond to that, and neither will victims.”

Nore’s reputation is enhanced by the fact that she spearheads one of the country’s most aggressive investigative agencies. Between 1987 and 1995, Washington state revoked or denied 373 certificates. Only California and Florida--states with considerably more educators--topped that number, according to NASDTEC. Last year, Washington closed 4,773 investigations--roughly 2,500 more than Florida and about the same as California.

Washington has not always been so vigilant. During her first years on the job, Nore was the state’s sole investigator. Then, in the late 1980s, Washington revamped its certification operation to better safeguard revocations and denials against legal challenges. The Office of Professional Practices was created as the state’s investigative arm, with the state education department’s general counsel at its head.

About the same time, the state created a code of conduct for educators. Many states grant their schools chiefs power to strip teachers of their
certificates for “unprofessional conduct,” but Washington’s code outlines specific actions that can jeopardize a certificate. These include falsification or misrepresentation of credentials; sexual misconduct (including physical or verbal advances); doctoring students’ grades or evaluations; and possession or use of illegal drugs on school premises. Alcohol abuse is considered a disease, but the state can revoke the certificate of a teacher who repeatedly comes to school under the influence.

Using the code’s guidelines, the general counsel evaluates the evidence gathered by investigators and determines whether the state should revoke or deny a certificate, issue a reprimand or suspension, or simply dismiss the case. Rick Wilson, the counsel, has made all these weighty decisions since 1990. In criminal cases where the accused is convicted of a crime involving abuse, neglect, or injury to a child, his job is a no-brainer: Revocation is automatic. Sometimes, the accused themselves negate the need for a decision: Since 1990, 166 educators--including Mary Letourneau--have surrendered their certificates, some before their cases even reached Wilson’s desk.

Wilson’s power to decide the fate of teachers does not go unchecked. A nine-member committee of educators hears appeals of his rulings. Such panels are not common--most states simply appoint a hearing officer. But it is hailed by both the state teachers’ union and Wilson, who views the panel’s oversight as a helpful reality check. “I think I have my pulse on education as much as anyone else,” he says. “I have a Ph.D. in education, I volunteer in the schools, and my wife is a teacher. But I’m still not in the classroom every single day, confronting the problems. I know if someone wanted to take away my license as a lawyer, I’d want nine people there who are practicing, who are there every day, and who are faced with the decisions that I face.”

Fingerprint background checks generate the bulk of OPP’s caseload. In 1992, the state legislature made such checks required for out-of-state hires and certificate applicants--a total of about 25,000 a year. Then, in 1996, lawmakers ordered a one-time fingerprinting of school personnel with regular access to children--42,000 people in all. They also agreed to require background checks of teachers who moved to a new district more than two years after their last fingerprinting.

Thanks in large part to the 1996 law, OPP last year sent 75,000 sets of fingerprints to the FBI’s fingerprint-processing facility in Clarksburg, West Virginia. There, staff trained in the Henry classification system--a sort of Dewey decimal system where the telltale whorls, loops, and arches of the finger’s skin are assigned numeric values--determine if the prints match any of the roughly 30 million prints from arrest records filed by local, state, or federal law-enforcement agencies. If there’s a match, the FBI forwards the individual’s rap sheet to OPP.

Such background checks rarely turn up monsters with mile-long rap sheets. But occasionally they do: In 1994, OPP discovered that a certificate applicant was wanted by California police on 30 counts of juvenile rape.

More frequently, the FBI returns a rap sheet with garden-variety arrests and convictions. The state has the power to withhold certificates from individuals convicted within the past 10 years of crimes that could, according to state board rules, “materially and substantially impair” the teacher’s classroom performance. The decision to exercise that power, however, is Wilson’s call. He must consider whether the conviction is for a years-old youthful indiscretion--a college arrest for drunk and disorderly conduct, for example--or a more serious crime with the potential to harm people or property. He must also weigh mitigating factors and motivations for the crime.

Nore and Wilson dismiss the convictions on most rap sheets as inconsequential. But they open investigations at times to make sure there are no hidden threats. A conviction for a domestic disturbance, for example, seems like it should have little bearing on a teacher’s classroom fitness. But when OPP staff track down police reports and court proceedings, they sometimes discover the conviction was the culmination of a plea bargain. The original charge: child abuse.

In 1997, OPP closed 3,500 cases generated from fingerprinting. Office staff hired as part of the 1996 law handle most of the paperwork on these investigations, tracking down arrest records and court dispositions. The agency’s newest investigator, Linda Harrison, handles many of the more sophisticated cases originating from a rap sheet as well as cases stemming from the certification process. She was the agency’s secretary and a state education department employee for nearly 30 years before Nore and Wilson promoted her in 1995 and gave her a year’s in-house training to become a full-fledged investigator.

Nore and two other veteran investigators, Stan Burczyk and Kathy Haslett, look into most of the cases that originate with a complaint filed by district or regional superintendents or private-school heads. (Unlike investigative divisions in states such as Florida and California, OPP cannot act on accusations from parents or the general public.) Burczyk is an ex-cop who logged 21 years with police in Hammond, Indiana, including six years on the sex-crimes unit, before joining OPP in 1991. He deals with much of the casework in the eastern part of the state from an office in Spokane. Haslett, hired in 1993, came to OPP from the investigative team of the state’s bureau and labor agency, but she knows kids. She has been a foster mother for nearly 20 years and is a regular volunteer child advocate with a nonprofit social services organization. She lives and works in Vancouver, on the state’s southern border just north of Portland, Oregon.

Their investigations are not the stuff of Dragnet. Indeed, OPP’s job is not to find out whodunit but to determine if something bad has even happened. OPP uses some of the tricks of the law-enforcement trade--Wilson wields subpoena power, for example--but investigators don’t go on stake-outs or run DNA samples through crime labs. And in cases where police or local prosecutors are involved, OPP puts its investigations on hold so as not to muck up law-enforcement work.

Over the years, Nore, Haslett, and Burczyk have investigated teachers guilty of some bizarre, if not laughable, behavior. There was the teacher who embezzled student-council funds and the principal who stole televisions from his own school. There was the teacher who forged a parent’s signature on a student’s federally mandated special education plan and the administrator run amok with a district credit card.

“When I came to this agency, I had never had a bad experience in school,” Haslett says. “To me, teachers were on a pedestal. And when I found out some of the things taking place, I thought they were isolated incidents, that these things don’t really happen in every school. I was wrong.”

The most outrageous accusations often involve sexual misconduct. Roughly 60 percent of complaints filed with OPP by local school officials focus on sexual behavior, from an inappropriate comment--"You look great in tight sweaters"--to fondling or intercourse. These are often the most difficult cases, and media attention almost always makes them supercharged. Newspapers across the state fax OPP weekly with requests for copies of complaints filed from school districts in their area.

Although every set of allegations is different, OPP’s sexual-misconduct caseload shows some patterns. Allegations of pedophilia are fairly rare. More often than not, men are the subject of charges of inappropriate physical contact. And more often than not, the alleged victim is a girl about 14, 15, or 16 years old. Girls this age, Nore explains, are maturing physically and are more vulnerable to sexual advances because they are beginning to rebel against their parents and keep secrets.

Often, sexual abusers target kids with low self-esteem. Such children are more vulnerable than a student-council president and more likely to turn to an adult for friendship or help. Also, if such children tell others about the abuse, they are also less likely to be believed because they are “problem” children.

Ironically, what a miscreant teacher does to win children’s confidence and “groom” them for sex is often indistinguishable from what an excellent teacher does. Both reach out to students, show an interest in their problems, and try to build their self-esteem. Often, they devote personal time to helping the student: A math teacher might offer private tutoring, while a soccer coach might offer to drive a favorite player to a tryout in another town. Mary Letourneau, for one, was a standout teacher who was well-known for making special efforts with kids. “It’s very difficult to look at two such teachers and know the difference,” says Wilson. “One deservedly should be the teacher of the year and has probably done this time and time again and reached a lot of kids. That other teacher is doing exactly the same thing, but there’s a different, darker motivation that you don’t know.”

Sometimes, the true motivation escapes notice for a long time. OPP has opened a number of sexual-abuse cases after adults have claimed they were molested or had a sexual relationship with a teacher 10 or 15 years ago. In a few instances of teacher-student sex, the girl has gone on to marry her teacher/lover, only to later report him to authorities after discovering that he was sleeping with his current students.

The allegations of one student usually don’t translate to rock-solid proof of wrongdoing, so investigators always look for other victims. The clues surface in unpredictable ways: Maybe a colleague of the accused teacher remembers him lavishing attention on another girl last year, or maybe a yearbook photo from a few years back shows the teacher leaning in a bit too close to a girl whose long, blond hair looks just like the alleged victim’s.

Nore handles most of the high-profile child-abuse cases. The key to these cases, she says, is always the victim’s sworn statement. To get this, Nore has to persuade the girl to say out loud the unspeakable things done to her by a teacher or a coach or an administrator. That’s not always easy. Sometimes, girls don’t want to talk because they think they love the teacher and see nothing wrong with their relationship. Others are too frightened to talk. They have been threatened, or they are wracked with guilt and think they’ll get in trouble.

Nore frequently travels to victims’ homes to interview them. The kitchen table is one of her favorite spots for such frank talk. It is the home’s center of gravity, a place where a child usually feels at ease. Normally, Nore opens her interviews with small talk, coaxing the girl into easy conversation with tidbits--her hobbies and interests, likes and dislikes--that she has gleaned from earlier conversations with the parents.

When the discussion moves to the allegations, she uses explicit language--words like breasts, penis, intercourse, and the like--so that the taboo is broached before the girl tells her tale. Most of all, Nore tries to convey to the child that she is someone to be trusted.

As they talk, Nore watches the girl closely, reading her body language for any sign--a fidget, the head ducking in shame--that she’s holding back key facts or passing along half-truths. Most of all, she studies the girl’s eyes. Through years of investigations, she’s learned that a person’s eyes telegraph their emotions, their fears, their pain. The eyes, Nore believes, truly are the windows to the soul.

OPP investigators view their jobs as fact-finding, but teachers and parents don’t always see their probes so benignly. When a beloved teacher faces an investigation for sexual misconduct, entire communities often rebel and talk of massive government conspiracies. “What constantly surprises me is that the public hasn’t caught on to the fact that these people don’t walk around in trench coats,” Burczyk says.

Wilson catches much of the flak directed at OPP. His name and signature appear on every order to revoke, suspend, or deny a license. “I’ve gotten death threats,” he says, “but the people who make death threats are never the ones that I’m worried about. If they’re saying it, chances are they’re not going to follow through.” As a precaution, Wilson and Nore have devised a system to alert staff to trouble brewing in behind-closed-door meetings with office visitors. Should either of them buzz and ask for a cup of coffee, that’s the signal to call the police--immediately.

For Wilson to discipline a teacher, he must conclude that there is “clear and convincing” evidence of a violation of the code of conduct. That’s a lesser standard than the “beyond a reasonable doubt” burden of proof required for criminal convictions, but it’s still a high hurdle. Local school officials in Washington must show merely a “preponderance of evidence” to fire someone.

In the end, Wilson dismisses roughly 75 percent of the cases. Sometimes, the investigation has clearly exonerated the teacher. But frequently, there’s just not enough evidence. “Every day we dismiss a case where we know that there’s probably something there,” he says. “But we just couldn’t meet the burden of proof.

“I’d much rather have a system where we look at 4,773 cases and throw out 95 percent or more. Then, we can at least make the judgment on people and know what we’ve got in the schools.”

Critics of OPP say these statistics suggest something altogether different: The agency is guilty of overkill. To them, OPP’s 1997 caseload of 4,773 investigations proves that the state is meddling in picayune matters where it doesn’t belong. And because OPP makes cases involving allegations of physical or sexual child abuse a top priority, it often takes months before investigaters follow up on reports of more minor violations--months during which a teacher is shrouded in suspicion. “You almost have to molest a child to get their attention,” jokes Jerry Painter, general counsel for the Washington Education Association. “Anything else just takes forever.”

Bill Powell, a lawyer who has represented teachers under investigation, contends that local school officials are sending OPP frivolous cases because the agency has warned of stiff consequences for failing to report suspected violations of the code of conduct. “Now, superintendents are reporting every two-bit thing going on in the schools. And rather than schools handling things and getting on with the business of education, it becomes a capital offense.”

One of Powell’s clients was investigated after she fell asleep at her classroom desk. “That’s not something that should be reported to the state superintendent of public instruction,” Powell argues. “That’s an example of the nit-picky garbage that doesn’t need to be investigated. It needs to be handled by the district.”

Painter also would like to rein in OPP. Legally, the state must prove a direct connection between teachers’ conduct and their classroom performance to issue a discipline order, and Painter argues the state sometimes pursues cases where that nexus is tenuous.

An affiliate of the National Education Association, the WEA backed the legislation to fingerprint veteran teachers, but only after the media jumped on the story of the arrest and conviction of a Seattle hall monitor for raping a student. “We had to take that position,” Painter says. “It was kind of like the question: Do you still beat your wife? What were we going to say: ‘We don’t want to protect kids from these sexual predators that are out there?’ ”

Fingerprinting, Painter claims, has not made schools appreciably safer: Of the 75,000 school employees fingerprinted after the 1996 law passed, OPP opened investigations on only five certificated individuals. The $4.1 million spent on that fingerprinting, Painter argues, would have been better spent on training school staff and faculties how to act around kids and how to spot problem teachers. But that doesn’t ring well in the legislature, he says. “You can’t beat your chest and say, ‘Well, we just provided two hours of training for teachers.’ Instead, they can say, ‘We’re fingerprinting the world.’ ”

Fingerprinting is a lightning rod for criticism in most states. California has been running background checks on teachers since the 1950s, but Paul Longo says his agency is still accused of teacher-bashing. “We’re not out to get teachers,” he says. “We’re out to get dopers and perverts who happen to hold certificates.”

Wilson and Nore argue that fingerprinting is invaluable. In presentations to education groups, Wilson demonstrates this using a certificate applicant from 1992. Before the background check law was passed that year, the Washington state patrol would have run that applicant’s name and date of birth through their records and uncovered no felonies. An FBI background check using the applicant’s fingerprint, however, turned up 19 arrests or convictions, including a conviction for counterfeiting from Detroit, a burglary arrest from New York, a charge of selling heroin from Los Angeles, and a charge of kidnapping from Oakland, California.

Background checks don’t turn up huge numbers of such felons, Wilson argues, because the bad guys get scared off. Criminals know that the fingerprinting will unearth their dark secrets, he contends, so they either don’t bother to apply for a certificate or they bail out of the profession when background checks are introduced. “Finding the bad person is more of the anomaly,” he says. “When we talk to reporters, they always say, ‘So how many bad guys did you find in the project?’ And my answer is: ‘That’s not what the checks are designed to do.’”

Proving that fingerprinting works as a deterrent is impossible, but Wilson argues there’s anecdotal evidence. When the state ran background checks on all school employees following the passage of the 1996 law, OPP heard stories from a number of districts about teachers and other certificated employees who balked at being fingerprinted and eventually quit. In all, the number of people fingerprinted fell 3,000 short of the forecasted count of 78,000. Not all of the 3,000 were ex-criminals who feared their rap sheets would be uncovered, Wilson contends, but some of them were.

As for the criticism that investigations take too long, Wilson agrees that OPP can do better. Probes stemming from complaints filed by local school officials run an average of two years. But he claims that a backlog of cases from the 1996 fingerprinting law has gummed things up. Once that backlog is trimmed, he says, the pace of investigations will speed up.

Investigations, however, will always take time if they are done thoroughly, Nore warns. Investigators must dig beyond the initial complaint to determine if the code violation reported to OPP is symptomatic of other misconduct. In other words, where there’s smoke, there’s often fire. “If you’re really going to do the things that we’re supposed to do, it takes a long time,” Nore says. “We’re always going to have longer timelines than people are going to be comfortable with.”

It’s been years since the case of the 14-year-old Hispanic girl first instilled Nore with a sense of mission, and the hundreds of investigations she’s done since have tempered her idealism somewhat. There’s no way to protect every child, she’s realized. Adults who are a threat to children don’t always have criminal records that turn up in FBI background checks. And sometimes, the pile of evidence in the case file just doesn’t reach high enough to meet the burden of proof.

But Nore still sees the goal of every one of her investigations as the protection of kids. Over the course of hundreds of investigations, she has seen lots of children hurt, but in the sexual-abuse cases, she says, children often are damaged beyond repair. “It’s bad enough when a child gets hurt physically. But in the sexual cases, they get hurt for a very long time. It takes a long time for them to get over it--if they do.”

Many times in her career, Nore has not managed to persuade the victim to give sworn testimony about what was done to her. She knows what happened--the girl’s eyes say it all--and she’s armed with a case file the size of the Seattle yellow pages. Yet without that critical sworn statement, she doesn’t have much of a case.

Still, Nore doesn’t push. If rumors of the abuse are circulating, she knows the girl has already suffered a lot: the lewd propositions from boys; the questions from parents and teachers who say they believe her but act otherwise; and the eyes, dozens of pairs of them, following her down the hallway at school. Perhaps if Nore were a police detective soured by years of slugging bad coffee from a styrofoam cup, she would urge the girl to sign the statement and close the case. But she’s not. Instead, Nore will tell the girl, “It’s OK if you don’t sign it; if you can’t, you can’t.” And she’ll move on to the next case.