A Better Way

By Elsa Schultze

Drug tests for teachers are a nice idea. After all, who wants children taught by depraved drug addicts? But testing teachers for drug use is a red herring. It's a way of appearing to protect the welfare of students while ignoring much more glaring problems in education. If a teacher is doing drugs and no one can tell, while that may be undesirable, that's private business. The real problem is that it's almost impossible to fire a teacher who acts crazy or is just bad.

In the world of teaching, tenure makes it extremely difficult to fire a teacher, despite consistently bad reviews or under-achieving students. We've all had those bad teachers, and statistically, very few of them were likely to be on drugs. Nationwide, only 4% of teachers use drugs, less than half of the average for all professions. Drug testing is unlikely to uncover substantial problems while incurring a substantial cost.

A teacher using drugs is likely to have erratic behavior and commit other crimes, such as distribution. The other crimes are easy enough to catch and there are plenty of procedures in place to dismiss a teacher who has been convicted of a crime.

Teachers who are not convicted of crimes are likely to have such normal behavior that they can function in everyday society, making them no different from people with other issues who have learned to function. But teachers who have erratic or unsatisfactory behavior are much more common that the incidence of drug use. There is little that can be done about those teachers, who do not teach their subjects well or provide a hostile learning environment. These teachers hurt the school system in a much more subtle way, by undermining confidence in education and the reputation of all teachers.

It is time to create a system to eliminate the dead weight from education, which will require school administrators to be less concerned with the perceived impact of a program, and more concerned with the actual impact.

A better way for school districts to protect education would be to weed out teachers who are ineffective or act as if they are on drugs, rather than try stabbing in the dark to weed out a tiny majority who do abuse drugs at an inefficient cost to the taxpayer.