Despite being fully certified by the state to work with children and having been in the classroom before, I was passed after three attempts to apply with ESI and legitimately called a “red flag” by a hiring manager on the phone because I didn’t provide a supervisor reference and did not go into further detail about a leave. If you have ever taught in Arizona, leaves are becoming more and more common for investigations and to bypass using HR, requiring applicants to provide supervisors gives prospective employers a chance to bypass protections for employees. Unfortunately not experience here is going to be good and supervisors are highly subjective. A bad supervisor does not mean the employer who left was bad. Any practice that requires a supervisor reference to move forward is simply a way for the company to work around laws that prevent bad mouthing and blacklisting former employees and preventing them from the right to work because of subjective experiences with them which is illegal. There is a reason references should only be contacted with employee consent. Too many schools are losing their teachers here in Arizona because of these toxic policies and instead of changing that climate, they are simply outsourcing to a third party to simply continue thier bad policies and culture. If you want quality teachers, hire credentialed and certified teachers who have been deemed fit by the Arizona licensing board and allow them to provide thier own references without restrictions on who they are allowed to use. At least I was honest. Nearly half my coworkers probably use a friend or a professional reference website to pretend to be a supervisor or coworker.
