Angelo Marina
Philosophy 341
Micheal Wagner
28 November 2013

An Endless Imbroglio Is Consequences and Duty Michael Baker is a newly appointed faculty member of the history department at Woodrow Wilson Senior High School. He is anxious about his preparedness in tutorial tasks and is overcome with a restless indignation of self-doubt. However, he finds an older teacher, Frank Thompson, a history teacher of notable popularity due to his classes’ successively high scores on statewide examinations, who decides to mentor him as he gets accustomed to the new job. Michael though notices that after hanging out with Frank for a while, that Frank is an alcoholic. Michaels has had to on multiple occasions, cover for Frank and substitute for his class while Frank recovered from his hangovers. While Michael was substituting for Frank, he realized from talking to Frank’s students, that Frank was pretty much just giving his students the information they needed in order to do good on tests, rather than teaching them the curriculum they were required to learn. When Michael decided to confront Frank about this issue, Frank asserted that it was grades and results that matter more, as opposed to the students understanding the material, in the grand scheme of things for him, the students, and the school at large. Michael feels conflicted by what he learned about Frank, and he feels that it’s his duty to take on these concerns, however, he is unsure about to address the issues of Frank’s alcohol problem as well as the outlook of knowledge as merely resulting from test scores?

“A habitual failure to perform work with the degree of skill or accuracy displayed by other persons…Nevertheless, there are times when only one incident may be of such magnitude or of such far reaching consequences that a teacher’s ability to perform his or her duties will be permanently impaired and a finding of “incompetence” would be proper.1” Incompetence, according to the courts in the previous passage, usually must involve a pattern or course of conduct. Factors such as lack of knowledge in the relevant subject matter; inability or disregard for teaching the designated curriculum; failure to work productively and effectively with colleagues, supervisors, and parents; and, lastly, failure to maintain adequate discipline and supervision of students who have been recognized as disobedient and juvenile, and thus disruptive to classroom progression. In the case of incompetence, Frank has not been teaching the students the designated curriculum because he has simply been leading irrelevant discussions on current political topics and sports. Additionally, Frank has done this consistently and thus has forfeited his competence as a teacher according to the courts.
Furthermore, school citizenship proclaims that insubordination and neglect of duty were reasons for formulating a teacher’s dismissal. In Altsheler v. Board of Education of the Great Neck Union Free School District the court advocated the dismissal of a teacher who prepared her students for the Standard Achievement Test by telling them the vocabulary words that were to be featured on the exam. “Acts of academic dishonesty such as helping students cheat on tests or obtain a diploma under false pretense are also general upheld as causes for dismissal.2” Frank, technically, only provides the relevant information that will be on the next exam because he can, as he purports, either call various sources to determine the exam trends or refer to older exams that he has kept. In this way, he is aiding the students in dishonest advancements that are clearly unfairly advantageous.
Moreover, the concept of role model serves to state that teachers are an example of conduct for students, and thus some statuses, such as a teacher being unfit and/or presenting conduct which is unbecoming, are not permitted. For instance, in Walthart v. Board of Directors of Edgewood-Colesburg Community School