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students. She relied on the other teachers’ lesson plans and materials to teach study strategies to the students. When the PIGS took over the eighth-grade team, the team stopped providing Barb with copies of tests and quizzes. She confronted the teachers during a meeting to ask why they had suddenly stopped furnishing these essential materials. The team didn’t respond. After the meeting, sixth- and seventh-grade teachers who were PIGS also stopped providing materials to Barb. The principal, who was chummy with the PIGS, refused to intervene. “It was the most disturbing thing I ever saw professionally,” Barb said. “If you were not a part of their clique, they didn’t help you, which meant you might struggle with a student who was at risk of failing. Some of the cliquey teachers would go as far as to exaggerate stories about you so that you felt isolated by the remainder of your peers, causing some teachers to quit education altogether or retreat into their classrooms where they eventually burnt out.”

High school, middle school, and elementary school staff around the country described the ways colleagues’ behavior mirrored that of the popular students. Evan, a teacher who founded the first Gay-Straight Alliance in Texas, annually organizes a Day of Silence at his magnet school, during which participating students do not speak in “recognition of the silence many LGBT suffer in keeping their sexual orientation hidden.” Even though the Day of Silence is a school-wide event approved by the principal, other administrators and teachers openly have called it “Stupid Gay Day” and have emailed Evan protests expressing disgust about “your gay group.”

Teachers in various states described cliques divided by religion, race, and/or seniority. A Minnesota teacher said, “The labels are the ‘veterans’ and the ‘young staff,’ and the veterans really let you know that you’re not a veteran teacher and that as a young teacher you should know your place until you put in your years.”

Because of these divisions, teachers can come to dread the faculty lounge—which one teacher called “the lion’s den”—just as much as students might dread the cafeteria. Eliza, who quit teaching partly because of teacher clique behavior, said that some teacher cliques at her Virginia school didn’t allow certain people to sit with them at lunch. “There were the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots.’ If the table went silent when you sat down, they didn’t like you, and made it clear you were not welcome. I felt like I was on a season of Survivor. I didn’t know who I could trust,” Eliza said. Disheartened, she and other young teachers would “hole up in our classrooms and eat by ourselves. We would get frustrated with the older bunch because they had lost sight of why we were all teachers in the first place. It was kind of ridiculous. Aren’t we all adults who should be setting good examples for our students? And the faculty meetings were hilarious. The members of the departments would be clamoring to sit together and save seats. Situations like this made me want to run away as far as I could from teaching.”

Even in some schools in which administrators have funded programs to try to combat bullying or hostilities among student cliques, educators are engaging in those same social behaviors. Teachers told me about secretaries who gossip about other teachers’ private appointments with the principal, departmental stereotypes (such as “wacky” fine arts teachers), and coaches of certain sports who get away with more than other staff members do. They said that other teachers make fun of their online photos or simply give, as one California teacher put it, “the distinct impression that I’m simply not cool or smart or cultured enough.” They talked about coworkers picking on them in order to impress other, cooler teachers.

A counselor in Virginia described an intimidating drama teacher who wielded power by controlling access to the auditorium. A Tennessee special education teacher said she is frequently excluded by other teachers, “as if I am special ed. also.” Teachers even discussed, in