Teacher Bullying, Statistically Speaking

Headnote

This real phenomenon has always been hard to quantify-until now.

Students, parents, teachers, and administrators seem to accept it as an unfortunate but inevitable feature of school life. There is a knowing shrug of indifference or resignation. Even when there is a complaint, it is rarely addressed.

The "it" in question refers to bullying behavior by teachers toward students.

Nearly all schools, to their credit, have embraced policies and protocols intended to address how students treat one another. The appellation "bullyproof" is routinely applied to programs schools adopt to reinforce civil behavior. Such programs focus almost exclusively on student interactions with their peers, while a pall of silence shrouds the phenomenon of "teacher as bully."

Although there is scant empirical research examining bullying by professional educators, anecdotal evidence abounds. Teachers who bully students often have a reputation within the school system. Colleagues who are bystanders often are aware of problematic conduct, but little is known about exactly what they observe, how often they observe it, how school administrators respond, or how bullying by teachers affects school climate.

With the assistance of Teaching Tolerance, we at Northern Michigan University conducted an online survey of 1,067 educators in July 2017. To our knowledge, this is the first significant survey of its kind.

Our survey defined teacher bullying as "a pattern of conduct, rooted in a power differential, that threatens, harms, humiliates, induces fear, or causes students substantial emotional distress." We listed behaviors that conform to this definition and asked teachers how often they observed such behavior by colleagues during the past year. We also asked how schools address this concern.

The data presented here lead us to conclude that the phenomenon of teachers who bully their students is something every school needs to consider. A small number of bullies can do enormous damage to a school's effectiveness. Bullying contributes to a harmful, discriminatory, and hostile climate in which learning is undermined and intolerance flourishes. It may also cause a contagion effect: Mean behavior by a teacher encourages students to be mean as well. We find that marginalized students may be especially vulnerable as targets. For the sake of students, educators, and larger communities of learning, we must do better.

We hope the results presented here, though...