A Lawyer's Perspective on the Current State of School Rule of Law (Part 1): 2019–2025

Interview and Drafting: Su Qiuzu, Wu Ching-han, Chiao

Interview Assistance: CC, Tsai Ta-jung, Pan Pei-chen, Chen Liling

Editing: Tsai Ta-jung, Pan Pei-chen, Lee Ming-ju

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The Legislative Yuan held a public hearing this month on the "Regulations Governing the Dismissal, Non-renewal, Suspension, or Severance of Teachers at Senior High Schools or Lower Levels" (hereinafter the "Dismissal Regulations") and the "Regulations Governing the Performance Evaluation of Teachers at Public Senior High Schools or Lower Levels" (hereinafter the "Teacher Performance Evaluation Regulations"). Teacher associations called for the prompt abolition of the "School Affairs Meetings," whereas parents' and human rights organizations argued that these meetings remain the only recourse for many vulnerable children and must not be abolished until a better grievance mechanism is established. Public opinion on the issue remained sharply divided prior to the publication of this newsletter.

In this newsletter, we interviewed attorney Weng Kuo-yen, who has long handled administrative litigation involving teachers, and attorney Hsiao I-hua, who has participated in nearly 100 administrative investigations in central Taiwan's schools this year alone, to examine the context of this issue in chronological order:

1. Before the 2019 Amendment: Acting as Both Player and Referee, the Teacher Supervision System Lacked Public Credibility

Attorney Weng reminded us that to understand today's "School Affairs Meetings," we must first return to its predecessor—the era of the Teacher Review Committee (TRC).

Prior to the major amendment of the Teachers’ Act in 2019, Taiwan's primary mechanism for handling incompetent teachers was the TRC established within each school. Composed of the principal, teacher representatives, and others, the TRC was responsible for both assessing the facts and making disciplinary decisions. The most long-standing criticism from the outside was that it was "both a player and a referee": the evaluators were colleagues from the same school, and under a culture of protecting peers, grievances from students and parents often came to nothing, making it difficult to weed out incompetent teachers.

Paradoxically, however, the issue of "teachers being wronged" was rarely discussed during that era. Because the entire system was tilted toward protecting teachers rather than punishing them, cases entering the investigation procedure usually reached a stage so severe it could no longer be ignored—when "students were full of complaints and parents were up in arms"—before things went this far.

2. The 2019 Amendment: Borrowing from the Gender Equity Education Act and Moving Toward Strict Comprehensive Enforcement

"The establishment of the School Affairs Meeting system under the new law in 2020 emulated the investigative system for campus gender incidents under the Gender Equity Education Act (hereinafter the Gender Equity Education Act), introducing external experts into schools to assist with investigations. The institutional design direction is largely correct, helping to prevent schools from conducting closed-door, black-box investigations, but the critical flaw lies in failing to consider that:

1. Compared to campus gender incidents, which tend to focus on handling individual teachers' behavioral deviations, campus incidents frequently involve teachers' professional and on-the-spot judgment in teaching settings. However, the current institutional design excessively intervenes in evaluating such judgments and responses, making teachers feel that their professionalism is being challenged and belittled.

2. Professional practitioners heavily rely on professional discretion and on-the-spot judgment in their practice, which inevitably means a moderate degree of standard ambiguity, thereby allowing schools to form certain buffer mechanisms to coordinate and resolve disputes. However, the School Affairs Meeting sets dispute resolution as mandating an investigation, with outcomes that are strictly black-and-white and leave no room for reconciliation. Teachers are denied ambiguity, fault tolerance, and mitigation mechanisms in their practice, and are all thrown into the meat grinder of the School Affairs Meeting for a 'comprehensive kill.' The three-in-one effect of standard ambiguity + absolute investigation + mandatory punishment attributes even systemic problems in the educational environment to the teachers, generating immense anxiety among frontline workers.

Consequently, within just a few years, it united with teacher groups into a massive wave of protest." ——Attorney Weng Kuo-yen

The Teachers’ Act underwent substantial amendments in 2019 and took effect on June 30, 2020. This amendment brought two major shifts:

(1) Widening the Narrow Gate and Strictly Enforcing Procedures for School Affairs Meetings

By "breaking" before "building," the core of this amendment was to transfer the supreme power of "fact-finding." Specifically, major incompetence cases reaching the dismissal threshold are mandatorily routed into the "School Affairs Meeting" (Campus Incident Handling Meeting) procedure.

When a grievance is filed, an investigative team is first hired externally from the competent authority's talent pool to conduct the investigation. The school's TRC then makes the final disciplinary decision, and finally, a review committee established by the county or city education bureau (Articles 52 and onwards of the Dismissal Regulations) exercises secondary oversight over the school's dismissal decision.

Beyond procedure, the scope of application spans from severe corporal punishment and bullying to abstract concepts such as "incompetence in teaching" and "serious violation of employment contracts," comprehensively and indiscriminately applying this strictest external investigation procedure regardless of severity.

Cases Subject to School Affairs Meeting Procedures Under the 2019 Amendments (Articles 14–16 of the Teachers’ Act)

Provision	Covered Circumstances
Article 14	Corporal punishment or bullying causing severe physical or psychological harm to students, or violations of law requiring dismissal and a permanent bar from re-employment.
Article 15	Corporal punishment or bullying causing physical or psychological harm to students, or violations of law requiring dismissal.
Article 16	Concrete evidence of teaching incompetence or inability to perform duties, or a serious breach of the employment contract.

(2) Transposing the Design of the Gender Equity Education Act

The inspiration for this amendment came in part from the Gender Equity Education Act system that had been operating for many years—featuring external gender incident investigation teams and investigations conducted by Gender Equity Education Committees, which structurally possessed greater independence than TRCs.

Attorney Weng pointed out that the Ministry of Education's logic seemed to be that this mechanism could be directly "transplanted" to other types of incompetent teacher cases. However, the nature of the two systems differs. Gender incidents have relatively clear behavioral definitions, whereas so-called "inappropriate teaching and counseling behaviors" are concepts with extremely blurred boundaries, making them difficult to measure with the same yardstick. Severe corporal punishment and vague concepts like "incompetence in teaching" and "inability to perform duties" are all forced through the same door, bearing the same investigative specifications and procedural costs.

3. Dilemmas of the New System After 2020: Chaos Rife from Substantive to Procedural Matters

The purpose of the 2019 amendment was originally to construct more rigorous procedures for suspending and dismissing teachers. However, after School Affairs Meetings went live in 2020, the cases handled or investigated by Attorneys Weng and Hsiao over these past five years revealed problems on several levels:

(1) Ambiguity of Standards

A. Regarding Determination Standards

Regarding determination standards, the Ministry of Education attempted to make an effort by formulating 11 reference standards1 in November 2020, covering items such as "poor classroom management," "poor teacher-student communication," and "inappropriate teaching behavior." However, these standards are highly abstract, lacking further operational definitions for investigative committee members to reference.

Attorney Weng noted that the standard for "incompetence in teaching" under Article 16 of the Teachers’ Act also suffers from the problem of ambiguous determination. In universities, this issue is particularly pronounced due to university autonomy, as each institution can independently determine its criteria for renewing teacher contracts. Consequently, many schools use student teaching evaluation scores as a decisive factor. Looking across numerous cases, a school's grounds for dismissal are typically that the teacher's teaching evaluation score fell below the university or departmental average, without any prior disclosure of benchmarks or improvement methods for the teacher's reference. By the time the teacher receives the dismissal notice, a fait accompli has usually been established.

Sharing his experience in handling university teaching incompetence cases, Attorney Weng stated that when encountering such situations, he challenges the university for violating the principle of clarity. He believes that without disclosing various evaluation standards, even if teachers wish to improve teaching quality, they have no way to start. In other cases, teachers have taught at a school for many years, and when the school decides to dismiss them, it dredges up the teacher's past faults over the years as grounds for dismissal. In these cases, even when teachers argue that events from many years ago should exceed the statute of limitations, courts mostly reject the argument, creating the bizarre phenomenon where teachers with more teaching experience face more grounds for dismissal.

B. Regarding Disciplinary Effects

In addition, Attorney Hsiao pointed out concerning situations regarding the provisional suspension system. Provisional suspension has a legislative purpose—to prevent further victims—but its operational reality on the front lines of schools may cause frontline teachers to suffer a plight where they cannot defend themselves, driven by schools' eagerness to shift risks. He observed this phenomenon to be especially pronounced in schools across central and southern Taiwan. In the north, at least substantial evidence is typically required before initiating a suspension, whereas in central and southern Taiwan, meetings sometimes become mere formalities; upon reviewing the application for investigation and deeming the matter serious or of public interest, suspensions are directly initiated, leaving teachers unable to offer a full defense.

(2) Professionalism and Impartiality of the "Talent Pool"

During the interviews, both attorneys raised the issue of uneven quality among experts in the expert talent pool:

"The Ministry of Education was overly confident, thinking that having so-called experts and scholars take three full days of classes would enable them to enter teaching venues and supersede teachers' instantaneous judgments in classrooms.

Furthermore, mimicking the Gender Equity Education Act, the Dismissal Regulations grant fact-findings within investigation reports extremely strong binding force. Investigation conclusions of uneven quality pack a massive punch, making it difficult for competent authorities to overturn them even if they sense something is amiss. Considering that judges, prosecutors, police, and investigators must undergo years of training to be qualified to determine complex human facts, why can members of a School Affairs Meeting investigation committee take the helm after merely three days of training courses?" ——Attorney Weng Kuo-yen

As mentioned, the 2019 amendment horizontally transplanted the Gender Equity Education Act mechanism, incorporating abstract elements such as "incompetence in teaching" and "serious violation of employment contracts" into strict external investigation procedures, thereby making external personnel responsible for fact-finding. In this regard, whether the determination standards are clear will be the critical factor determining whether the new system can be implemented robustly.

When facing the application of abstract, highly uncertain elements and disciplinary decisions, personnel composition might safeguard procedural justice through professional judgment. However, under implementation following the 2019 amendment, the talent pool and its external investigation procedures have instead added insult to injury.

First, when confronting the investigative judgment of abstract legal elements and the choice of final punishment, the subjective judgment of individual committee members often becomes the decisive variable of the outcome. Yet, Attorney Hsiao I-hua pointed out that this talent selection undergoes virtually no substantive review. Committee member qualifications are acquired simply by taking a class and passing a test on investigation reports to enter the talent pool.

Currently, sources for investigative committee members—the talent pool established by the Ministry of Education—consist of approximately 80% teachers. Both Attorneys Weng and Hsiao worry that the talent pool does not necessarily possess investigative or legal expertise. Attorney Hsiao mentioned with deep concern during his interview: "These quasi-judicial procedures are clearly meant to do things akin to what judges do, yet when you are performing judicial work, you use such shoddy talent pool qualifications."

Regarding the impartiality of the talent pool and investigative procedures, Attorney Weng specifically cited Taipei High Administrative Court Judgment No. 1351, 2023. In that case, a teacher was reported for suspected disciplinary conflict. During the investigation into whether the teacher engaged in inappropriate disciplinary behavior, the investigative committee randomly sampled students for interviews. However, during the process, they interrupted statements more favorable to the teacher and allegedly guided students toward answers disadvantageous to the teacher. The court ultimately concluded that the committee members failed to maintain the impartiality of the investigation team and lost the opportunity to obtain evidence favorable to the plaintiff, violating Articles 9 and 36 of the Administrative Procedure Act. This also impaired the objectivity and completeness of the investigation report, rendering it unable to present the facts comprehensively, which subsequently led the School Affairs Meeting and Performance Evaluation Committee to make judgments based on insufficient information, constituting an illegal defect. The illegal defect in this case was caused by the investigative committee's practical lack of due process awareness.

Attorney Weng specifically explained that over 80% of cases in which administrative courts revoke school disciplinary decisions involve procedural disputes. For years, administrative courts have heavily resorted to the concept of "high personal affinity," holding that both fact-finding and the severity of disciplinary measures fall within the scope of school discretionary judgment, and have rarely intervened, resulting in grossly inadequate safeguards.

The following judgment provides a meticulous review of investigation reports and serves as a stepping stone toward the sound development of our nation's educational legal system, making it worthy of reference.

"During the investigation, the investigation team failed to conduct an objective and exhaustive investigation into matters favorable to the plaintiff. Examples include excluding, preventing, or interrupting statements by parents and students favorable to the plaintiff, or focusing on investigating matters disadvantageous to the plaintiff while refusing to interview student D and their parents. Consequently, all evidence and information favorable and unfavorable to the plaintiff could not be presented objectively and completely; instead, facts were constructed on a foundation predominantly unfavorable to the plaintiff. This prevented the performance evaluation committee from obtaining complete evidence and information, and discrepancies existed between the contents of the investigation report and the interview verbatim transcripts. Under conditions lacking evidence and information regarding the facts of the illegal acts attributed to the plaintiff, there was a possibility of incorrect fact-finding and erroneous application of legal provisions, thereby affecting the degree of demerit or reprimand the plaintiff might receive. The original administrative disposition should therefore be revoked."

(Taipei High Administrative Court Judgment No. 1351, 2023, fourth-to-last paragraph)

Note: While the overall plaintiff win rate in administrative litigation remains below 20%, administrative courts in recent years have indeed seen certain judgments courageously implementing due process of law in teacher legal disputes. Attorney Weng specifically cited examples such as Supreme Administrative Court Judgments No. 692 and No. 629, 2024.

(3) Fragility of Testimony and Environments Prone to Leading Questions

Under the aforementioned issues plaguing both personnel composition and substantive effects, problems do not end there; the nature of campus incidents below senior high school undeniably adds insult to injury. Both Attorneys Hsiao and Weng have observed another core problem—the high fragility of testimony. The statements of underage students are easily molded even before entering formal proceedings.

In this regard, an administrative court judgment once pointed out in a case where the investigated subjects were mostly 8-year-old schoolchildren: "...the subjective consciousness and questioning methods of the questioner easily influence the respondents' answers, and it is even harder to avoid such situations particularly when the interviewees investigated in this case were mostly schoolchildren right at the age of 8."2 This demonstrates that this is not only a worry in teaching venues but a dilemma recognized in judicial practice. However, recognition alone is not enough; corresponding measures are also required. Unfortunately, regarding this dilemma, Attorney Weng Kuo-yen pointed out that there are no safeguarding mechanisms in the procedure; the Ministry of Education's approach is to leave it to the implicated teachers to figure things out on their own, and with luck, they might overturn the investigation report (such as the aforementioned judgment noting that the composition of the investigation committee was illegal and thus refusing to adopt the testimony).

From experience, Attorney Hsiao shared a scene he has witnessed repeatedly—the small interview room, parents on both sides, and the student in the middle. If it is a gender incident involving a young girl, he often observes the student looking troubled and hesitating in speech, with certain matters simply too daunting to utter in front of the parents. Then come the preconceived notions of parents. He said, "Parents will pressure and pressure their daughter from beginning to end on how she should speak, how she should speak." Thus, a guided statement enters the formal investigation procedure.

Faced with cases like the above, Attorney Hsiao I-hua offered an approach—with parental consent, he asks them to temporarily leave the room so that the student has space to speak for themselves. However, whether such an approach can be accepted by parents in every individual case remains uncertain for how other cases are handled in the absence of institutional regulations.

Furthermore, group cases are even more complex. He noted that the type that gives him the biggest headache is when a group of students act as witnesses for each other, applicants for investigation for each other, and victims for each other. Attorney Hsiao I-hua observed that "everyone is speaking for themselves, and cases of colluding on testimonies are ubiquitous."

He believes the appropriate countermeasure might be to expand investigations, interview more external witnesses, and then cross-reference each person's statements to identify inconsistencies. He said, "This is somewhat similar to criminal litigation; if stories aren't coordinated, the defense collapses." However, without institutional mandates or coordination from the talent pool to ensure this approach can be implemented in every single case, group cases remain an institutionally concerning presence.

(4) Low Initiation Thresholds and Superior Return Mechanisms

Apart from ambiguous standards and talent pool concerns, controversies in the 2019 amendment also include mandatory investigations upon reports during early stages, low initiation thresholds for anonymous reports, and return mechanisms by education bureaus in later stages. These are believed to risk forcing teachers to adopt defensive teaching.

A. Excessively Low Initiation Thresholds, Making a Federal Case Out of Minor Issues, and Anonymous Reports Preventing Traceability

As structured under the Dismissal Regulations, when schools receive reports or become aware of suspected teaching disputes involving teachers (including disciplinary concerns), they "shall" convene a School Affairs Meeting for deliberation within five days. This word "shall" leaves schools with virtually no room not to initiate—as long as someone complains, the procedure must run its course.

Crucially, the statutory provisions also stipulate that events reported by the media are deemed reports, requiring schools to proactively enter processing procedures. Coupled with the permission of anonymous reports, the threshold for complaining is virtually zero. Dissatisfied parents can make a single phone call to trigger a formal investigation procedure spanning several months that mobilizes an external investigative team.

According to Attorney Weng, among cases he encountered, an elementary school subject teacher chose to let a student complaining of a stomachache rest by laying their head on the desk rather than immediately sending them alone to the health center, and was ultimately determined by the investigation report to have engaged in "inappropriate teaching and counseling behavior." In another case, a sixth-grade homeroom teacher assigned a composition titled "A Letter to My Homeroom Teacher"; a parent complained, arguing that asking students to write letters to the teacher was tantamount to forcing them to butter up the teacher. The School Affairs Meeting initiated proceedings on this basis.

These cases collectively reveal a problem: teachers' daily teaching venues are fraught with on-the-spot judgments lacking standard answers, yet the design of School Affairs Meetings allows any single judgment to be complained about post hoc and trigger a rigorous formal investigation procedure.

B. Unidirectional Pressure of the Return Mechanism

After completing investigative procedures, teachers still cannot assume the matter has come to a close because external investigative committee members do not hold absolute power. Attorney Weng noted that many minor cases actually initially result in resolutions of no punishment or only minor penalties after investigation. However, these cases are frequently returned by education bureaus demanding that schools intensify punishments. While high-profile social cases certainly involve lenient sentencing, in the face of numerous cases that are not leniently sentenced, education bureaus should not use teachers as scapegoats merely to resolve pressure from parents, arbitrarily returning investigation reports and implicitly requiring schools to penalize every single case.

Regarding cases returned by education bureaus, after researching a vast number of related cases, Attorney Weng discovered a nearly exceptionless regularity: education bureaus return cases in only one direction—from "unfounded" back to demand a change to "founded," or from "demerit" back to demand a change to "dismissal." He has yet to see a return changing a decision from severe to lenient or from founded to unfounded.

Note:

Regarding the abuse of the "return mechanism" mentioned by Attorney Weng, authorities repeatedly reach their hands into Gender Equity Committees even during internal school investigation stages, demanding alterations to investigation reports and overturning investigation conclusions of unfounded sexual harassment. A classic example is: Taipei High Administrative Court Judgment No. 188, 2021.

4. How to Improve?

How can the aforementioned chaos be improved? The two attorneys pointed out different focal observations. Attorney Hsiao mentioned the importance of rights notification and knowledge transmission. When serving as an investigative committee member, he explains procedural matters one by one before interviews begin: informing interviewees of recording rights, explaining the identity of the committee members, clarifying the investigation schedule, and telling parties they may still supplement written statements after the interview. He stated these are all things he slowly figured out through practice and now emphasizes more heavily in his classes.

Attorney Weng's thoughts are more forceful, believing that wrongful and erroneous cases can be prevented through accountability mechanisms. Holding erring investigative committee members individually accountable is a possible direction. Attorney Weng shared with us that observing over the years, the backbone and integrity of investigative committee members are paramount. Crucially, when one's views differ from outside voices, one must still persist in what one believes is right under headwind pressures and remain true to one's conscience.

Of course, placing excessively heavy burdens on investigative committee members might indeed lead them to adopt defensive investigations in response, or even directly refuse to serve as committee members, which could backfire. Setting aside the personal level, Attorney Weng believes that the systemic root cause prone to procedural illegal defects is that administrative relief agencies such as administrative courts and appeal committees have long supported the practices of schools and authorities, condoning the existence of illegal defects. Without powerful entities learning lessons from this, mistakes will naturally be repeated. Conversely, when schools and authorities lose lawsuits a few times, a prolonged illness makes one a good doctor, and they will begin to review whether current practices must be improved and examined. For example, the "Checklist of Common Error Patterns in Teacher Dismissal, Non-renewal, and Suspension Cases Handled by Junior Colleges and Above"3 provided by the Ministry of Education to various universities is precisely a list of lost lawsuit cases accumulated by the administrative authorities themselves! Therefore, he believes that making schools or superior authorities bear government compensation or internal disciplinary responsibilities is a mechanism that might compel schools and authorities to learn their lessons, handle every case prudently, and prevent the recurrence of wrongful and erroneous cases.

1 Order Tai-Chiao-Kuo-Bu-Tzu No. 1090126278B: Ruling interpreting Article 16, Paragraph 1, Subparagraph 1 of the Teachers’ Act applicable to schools at and below the senior high school level.

2 Refer to Kaohsiung High Administrative Court, Local Administrative Litigation Division, Summary Judgment No. 239, 2024.

3 The Ministry of Education has not publicly released this and has only issued it to universities for reference; furthermore, it only targets the university level and has not compiled a list of common error patterns for levels below senior high school.

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To be continued... Please see the next part.

A Lawyer's Perspective on the Current State of School Rule of Law (Part 2): Post-2026 New System and the Future