Yes, a felony is a felony. What priests were doing in the '70s and the '80s were felonies. Somehow that minor detail didn't make a lot of difference. Why? Along the way the parents of the abused kids didn't press charges, the church didn't notify the authorities that one of the employees it would have to protect in court was doing anything wrong.
In other words, a felony isn't always a reported felony.
At my grad school one stu-gov appointee was working hard on sexual harrassment claims. He was told there were none. Period. On the other side was a survey saying there was a fair amount, and women who came forward and said they had been sexually harrassed. Finally he got an administrator to say that any sexual harrassment claim would have been settled out of court, the records and the amount of money paid in the settlement would have been sealed, a non-disclosure agreement would have been signed on both sides, and the records most likely would have been placed in a locked filing cabinet in the office of the administrator in charge of sexual harrassment. The administrator saying this *was* that administrator, and as he said it he was leaning against a locked filing cabinet. Not all communication needs to be verbal and context matters.
Same with teachers. There was a bit of a scandal perhaps 15 years ago. It was determined that out-of-court settlements had sealed records of child abuse by teachers. The incidents would not be reported to the state ed agency. The teacher's record would be clean. Rape and sodomy notwithstanding. Some teachers were serial victimizers--hence the scandal. In some cases the settlement required that the teacher move to another district or leave the field; if "leave the field" they could just be certified in another state.
The "union" tie-in is that states with strong unions with lots of lawyers for protecting teachers seemed to have had more of this. The teachers had better, more consistent protection--from the first minute the allegations were made. You can call this "due process." But due process is what you get in the courts, not in the district superintendant's office as a deal is reached to spare the district's reputation and not drag the 10-year-old boy or the 12-year-old girl through the mud by making him/her give testimony, making the case a big deal. Even if you don't release the kid's name, the other kids figure it out--then their parents know, and the community knows.
Does this go on today? Who can tell? Nobody could tell it was happening back then.
We still get the flurry of pregnancies that become obvious every spring from early fall teacher-student romances. When the father is made known (these days that's not so important in some schools).
We have laws making it a requirement that schools now report such things. But if they do and nobody wants to testify against the teacher, it goes precisely nowhere.
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Test scores are not the final authority on how good a teacher is. Low test scores don't show an ineffective teacher. But an ineffective teacher without independent, high-achieving students will have low test scores.
And in many cases tenure--or the more attenuated version that some states have--does prevent ineffective teachers from being fired. If a teacher is ineffective and still on probation, you just don't renew the contract. If the teacher isn't on probation then there's a process you need to follow to dispose of the teacher. That can be lengthy. The teacher can rise to the occasion and complete the process to be "highly effective" and then lapse again the following year. And then there's the kicker--if that ineffective teacher isn't being dealt with the same as every other equally ineffective teacher, the district has additional problems.
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