Not sure about your area but in my experience tax levies go to infrastructure and are promoted as such and not teacher pay. I suspect if your tax levies were to go to increasing teacher pay they would fail.
I just looked at our recent levy. Although “school operations” are included in the intended use of the funds, it appears none go directly to teacher salaries. I also noticed that 80% of the funding for our district comes from the State. So, I can’t vote to increase teacher salaries, but I can vote for state legislators who will try to do so.
To return to the topic of the thread. I don’t care if a teacher is doing the porn thing for money or for kicks, I would allow them to keep teaching.
It shouldn’t matter why they do it, anyway. I fail to see why a job should be able to control your legal leisuretime activities unless they can demonstrate a direct risk to your job performance (e.g. pilots’ restrictions on consuming alcohol before a flight).
Years ago a headhunter contacted me about a one year contract for a job with excellent pay. They really needed me and the one year thing fit perfectly. I interviewed and was hired.
When I arrived for work my first day I was told to go to a local hospital for my drug screen. I laughed in the woman’s face and went home, seething.
After ignoring dozens of phone calls, I answered. The business had a contract with the city and so had to do random drug screening. I explained I would never have bothered interviewing had I known.
Turns out “random drug screening” wasn’t really all that. I agreed to pass an initial urine test on a date of my choosing, which I did, and passed. For the following 11 months the administrator “fixed it” so I would not be picked.
I would have been furious about being drug tested—even when those drugs were illegal, and even though I’ve never used recreational drugs (barring alcohol and caffeine). It feels authoritarian, and it’s patronizing and infantilizing. I know the practice is common; I guess I just have a low tolerance for morality policing.
This case really does put a finer point on the issues. Your link was paywalled for me but here is a gift link to a NYT article on it.
Legally seems slam dunk he can be canned.
But university policy wise?
He’s been open about his position that porn performers are needlessly vilified and that porn has a place as expression. These are adult students.
Defending expressions of hate or even disagreeable political speech but firing over sexuality?
C’mon.
I have two problems with that argument. First, although some might agree with it as an aspirational objective, it’s simply not true in the real world. In the real world that we actually inhabit, employers – both public and private – are entitled to preserve a desired image and reputation and may require that employees not engage in any activity that undermines that reputation, even on their own time. This is not unusual, and may actually be reflected in the language of the employment contract. As I mentioned earlier, I once worked for such a company. It wasn’t some oddball outfit, either, it was a large multinational that was also an excellent place to work because they genuinely empowered their employees, but the business environment was very competitive and they valued their reputation both for product excellence and the integrity of their employees, who typically maintained an ongoing relationship with customers.
The second problem with your argument is that in the phrase “unless they can demonstrate a direct risk to your job performance”, the word “demonstrate” is doing some heavy lifting. It suggests that a teacher should be able to take the school board to court and require it to “demonstrate” that their porn activity impacts their job performance. No, they shouldn’t, and they can’t – as we’ve seen in some of the teacher firing examples cited here, some of which were appealed and the dismissals upheld.
Let’s look at it more closely using the example of the airline pilot. In this country, where recreational cannabis is legal, major airlines require pilots and in fact all personnel involved in any aspect of flight operations to totally abstain from cannabis at all times – not just while on duty, but always. Is there any “demonstrated” risk to anyone if a pilot smoked some weed on vacation several weeks prior? Almost certainly not, and in fact even government regulators disagree, requiring only abstinence for 28 days prior to being in control of an aircraft. But airlines consider it prudent to exercise an abundance of caution when dealing with unknowns. They don’t have to “demonstrate” anything.
In the case of porn-star teachers, the potential risks are different but the same reasoning applies: the school and its governing board have a right to protect their reputation, but much more important, they have the right to mitigate any potential risks to the children they’re responsible for by enforcing standards of behaviour for the teachers. We’ve already seen examples of teachers who do these things also being guilty of other serious lapses in judgment, like the one who filmed porn in the classroom after hours with the theme “who wants to be my next teacher’s pet?”.
And with respect to that last one, I don’t buy the argument that someone raised that this example – but not the other sex workers – was for sure a firing offense because it involved misuse of government property. FFS, the well-being of our children ought to be a hell of a lot more important than “government property”, like misappropriating paper clips from the supply cabinet. Teachers are mentors and authority figures over the most vulnerable members of our society, and they should be held to correspondingly high standards. And yes, they should be paid better, especially in the US where poor school funding and union-busting are both chronic diseases.
I agree we should hold teachers to high standards. I just don’t agree that posting porn violates those high standards (in my view, I understand “society” views it differently)
This isn’t a freedom of speech issue. They are free to bare their souls on any issue. But they are responsible for how that naked truth reflects on the image of the University. Pornography does not reflect well on the University.
I agree with you, except I didn’t think this thread was merely describing the actual, real-world conditions. If it is, then you’re absolutely right that the moral taint of wicked pornography can get you fired from any number of jobs. It’s also true that women, in general, get paid less than men for the same work (I wonder if this includes pornography?). It’s also true that many US states allow people to fire employees for any reason or no reason, so long as there’s no discrimination against a protected class involved.
I just think we can do better.
I may be wrong, but I was under the impression that if you are not a member of an educational trade union they can force you to take an oath that you are not a Communist, fire you for being gay, almost anything really.
However there is one huge difference. School districts are agents of the state and therefore they do not have as much leeway as private companies in punishing employees that are due 1st Amendment protection outside of their official duties (Garcetti decision). Assuming no contract covering this, if a private employee post a facebook post their company hates and even if it’s not about the company they can be fired. A school teacher not so much. I don’t know if porn is consider an “expression” but if so it would probably be illegal for a school district, police department, fire department, city/county government to fire that employee whereas any private company could with no hesitation.
Of note to that, the issue is not being a member of a specific political party but rather a group that advocates the overthrow of the government. The same logic & legality would hold if a teacher were fired for being part of the 1/6 insurrection.
In California, to get a credential every teacher needs to swear they are not a member of the Communist Party.
The second story, he’s a teacher in a private school. That not the same as public school teaching labor-law-wise. It would be like if Chik-Fil-A fired him for being gay. If he’s not in a state where that is a protected class, buh-bye.
Add to that that bullying by bosses is allowed in the workplace. In some places it’s even encouraged.
Indeed “freedom of speech” in the Constitutional Right sense is not at play. A university can fire if they do not like how the speech reflects upon them.
And universities often give wide berth to unpleasant or unpopular speech, which I in general think is the side that a scale should be weighted. Not as an absolute but weighted.
The fact that sexuality so heavily crosses the line is … bemusing.
I think teachers are expected to be a good role model. It’s part of the job of being a teacher. Sure, porn is a reality. Sure, a lot of people have done porn, and far more watch it; but it certainly doesn’t need to be encouraged as something that good people actively participate in. Teenagers will jump on any “bad” behavior an adult leader engages in, using the argument that if it is OK for (teacher, president, mom) to do it, then why not me, too. We learned this with Bill Clinton and Monika – if the PRESIDENT says blowjobs aren’t sex, guess what us hormonal-already-sort-of-wanted-to-mess-around teenagers did? That’s right, third base was suddenly a lot easier. Oddly, going all the way actually went down somewhat, and with the exception of one sr prom casualty, the me and my friend group all graduated high school as technical virgins – but for every one of us, it was only technical, as we had all been to third base at least once. Lets just say that blowjobs aren’t the end of the world, and not particularly damaging to a young adult’s life. But porn? Oh my, that’s can deliver some serious and permanent consequences. We really don’t want the people in places of respect to be caught doing porn, as it will lead some teens right down the same pathway.
On our last two statewide initiative that would increase teacher pay, both were defeated. The last with less than 40% of the vote
Over the same time, the voters lowered their state income tax rate from 4.63% to 4.4%
Our state legislature, that has Democratic majorities by a wide margin, took away the stipend for National Board teachers.
Although Douglas County passed a tax levy for increasing teacher pay, every district in Colorado Springs voted it down.
Remind me again how you are paying me like a professional, a role-model and enough that I don’t need a second job whether driving for Amazon Flex, doing warehousing at Walmart or making homemade porn.
Note: This last part is not for Procrustus, but rather selected others in the thread and about 60% of the Colorado voters.
My DIL near Denver quit teaching largely due to the shitty pay. Said if she was working that hard she ought to be paid more, and if she wasn’t paid more she should be working less. I was shocked to learn how much less she earned than teachers here in Chicago area burbs of similar socio-economic levels.
Folk in Colorado sure seem to like their teachers poor and their students dumb!
I wouldn’t really want to base my argument on “teachers are underpaid”. I’d be just as uncomfortable with a public school firing her for posting porn for free.
Ha! I said a similar thing — UWL (my employer) is suffering a reputational hit overall, but a few potential students (and would-be instructors) might think, “wow — that’s edgy and kinda cool, more like what you’d see in California.”
Joe Gow (the UW-La Crosse chancellor fired for vegan porn) was, until six days ago, my boss’s boss’s boss. Just days before his firing, I had attended the winter commencement ceremony he ran.
I always like him on a personal level, but my boss has long told me that, as an administrator, he’s been slacking off for years — and know we know why. It’s not so much the porn — it’s all the time and effort he was putting into activities not his job. (He published two pseudonymous books with his wife!). I’d almost feel as perturbed if he were putting all that time into, say, poetry.