The school checked, found the claims to be baseless and simply a fit of pique by the children in question. Did the school have the right to force the children to log into their Facebook accounts on school property to see the messages? Debatable, but again, the teacher in this case has done nothing wrong. So saying that "everyone failed" and lumping the teacher in is wrong-headed ridiculousness.

Wait, how did the teacher fail in this case? The students clearly failed because at age 12 and 13 you should know enough to not tell lies about people just because you're angry.

School district may have failed by actioning on a Facebook post not made on their computers. That's up for debate, but it is perhaps understandable that they acted to both protect the teacher and their reputations and send a message to other students that this level of name calling is not acceptable.

Parents definitely failed in not monitoring their children or teaching them appropriate impulse control. If you're going to turn control over your children to a school, then you can't act shocked when the school disciplines your child. It's great that some of the parents are considering getting lawyers and giving their children a chance to experience how the legal system works, but perhaps had the parents shown this level of interest in their children to begin with, it wouldn't have happened.

But the teacher here was just doing his job teaching students. Call a teacher stupid? Well, I suppose, although even that shows a distressing lack of respect for an authority figure who, by all accounts, hasn't done anything to warrant it. Call them a rapist, a pedophile and accuse them of mental illness? All of those are career enders for teachers (again, generally because of parents who are only involved in their children's lives when they smell a payday with a lawsuit) and, unless the student has a legitimate accusation, should require consequence.

So I see student fail, school fail and parent fail, but how the hell did the teacher fail? The teacher was maliciously and slanderously attacked for doing his job. Seriously, we've gotta stop treating teachers as second class citizens. Just lumping everyone into the blame game to seem fair or even handed is bad critical thinking and neither fair nor even handed.

Or every John Hughes film ever made....IF THEY WERE SET IN SPACE. But don't worry. Our uniquely rebellious planet will learn that it has an inner strength and doesn't need that bitchy exoplanet's approval. As a sign, Earth will take two perfectly good prom dresses and rip them apart only to reassemble them in a Frankenstein's Monster creation resembling a cross between a potato sack and a straightjacket for Rainbow Bright. Then, after prom, Earth will bang Andrew McCarthy and this will somehow force Jon Cryer to star in a sitcom with the Sheen that didn't marry Paula Abdul. Yeah. That'll show 'em.

More than any other job, teaching depends on a multitude of parties "doing the right thing" in order to be successful. Teachers are definitely one of those, but the best teacher in the world can't overcome parents who aren't involved with their children, a home environment and surroundings that don't value education, children themselves who may have been taught that teachers are "bad" and the public education system is "bad" so they want none of it and school administrations which are more interested in CYA than supporting their teachers. One, maybe two, of these can break down or be sub-par and a child still might get an education. But in many systems, you've got massive cascading breakdowns in all of them. Trying to then point out the faults in just one of them is then little more than blame shifting and finger pointing. Further, because of their intertwined nature, how can you fix one of them without fixing all of them? Any improvement in one area will slowly be ground down by the interference coming from the others. Are there bad teachers? You bet there are. Maybe more than anyone would like to admit because having the desire to work with kids and education doesn't mean having the ability to navigate the current learning environment. But unless this evaluation takes into account the whole picture (kids, parents, administration, teachers and environment), it's just another bandwagon "Let's blame teachers!" torches-and-pitchforks battlecry. Even worse, its just bad journalism. It also means the teachers who the evaluation call "good" are about to get all sorts of hell unleashed on them as parents read these things and then fight, sometimes quite viciously, to have Little Billy put into the top teacher's classroom or, upon seeing Little Sally is in a "bad" teacher's classroom, well, what's the point?

SETI@home can get over 3 million volunteers to scan the sky, but Julian Assange, in an Internet positively filled with people who would love to be a part of something like this, can't find a thousand people to help review documents and redact names that aren't needed and somehow this is Amnesty International's fault? Climb off the cross, Julian, the Taliban needs the wood to build fires and burn alive those you named.