Two news stories out of Ohio this month grapple with the thorny issue of teacher privacy rights. The first, reported in Cleveland's The Plain Dealer, involves a warning from the Ohio State Department of Education to teachers who showcase their risky (and risque) behavior on public websites. Apparently, bragging about their non-educational prowess online can be considered "conduct unbecoming." The state asserts that this provision allows it to sanction teachers who post inappropriate material on public websites, such as MySpace and Facebook.. Doing its part to protect the public good, The Plain Dealer searched the sites and turned up profiles of three noteworthy Ohio teachers: one who claims she's "an animal in bed", another who admitted to taking drugs, and yet another who described his mood as "dirty."

The second story from The Columbus Dispatch exposes the inevitable tension between what's in state law versus what's in a teachers union contract, and which trumps which. For example, the Columbus teachers' contract gives teachers quite a bit of protection from having their lives aired in public. It requires that a union representative be present when a personnel file is viewed, that a third party's request to look at the file is subject to a waiting period, and that discipline records must be purged after a certain period of time. However, under Ohio law, members of the public have the right to view a teacher's file (including any information relating to professional conduct or performance) at any time.

While it is technically state law that trumps district agreements, in practice, it appears to play out differently. A negotiator for the state school boards association explained that local school boards tend to approve teacher contracts--even those with contradictory language--to "please teachers and avoid strikes" and that contract language, while technically invalid, has a "chilling effect" on anyone who asks to look at a teacher's file.

NCTQ will expose more of these competing interests between law and district agreements beginning in January, when we will release our analysis of state laws impacting teacher governance.