NEW ORLEANS — Abusive teachers prey on students in classrooms across the country — and too often there’s nothing parents can do about it. Laws actually protect many teachers from being fired even when it’s clear they are guilty of wrongdoing.
At the start of this school year, parents at one Queens, N.Y., school dropped their students off for the first day of school and found out that their teacher had previously been found guilty of physically abusing students.
But the teacher wasn’t fired; instead, he was enrolled in anger management classes, fined $2,500 and sent back to teach first grade. The parents contacted Campbell Brown, an award-winning journalist and founder of the Partnership for Educational Justice. Brown worked with the parents to publicly shame the school into removing the teacher from the classroom. But he remains employed on “administrative duty” because of his tenured status.
Although public opinion was enough to get that teacher removed from the classroom, many other dangerous teachers remain on the job. But Brown is not content to let the status quo live on without a fight.
At the American Federation for Children’s National Policy Summit on Tuesday, Brown spoke about a lawsuit the Partnership has filed to challenge laws in New York that protect the worst-performing tenured teachers. Brown was inspired by the success of Vergara v. California. In that case, the state Supreme Court ruled that California’s tenure, dismissal and layoff statutes violated the state constitution’s equal protection clause. The court said the poor, minority students were more likely to be assigned to a bad teacher.
Teachers unions filed a motion to dismiss the New York case and protect abusive teachers, but a judge ruled against the motion a few weeks ago.
When asked why she got involved with the movement to hold bad teachers accountable, Brown said, “Because it was the most vulnerable people in our society. It was children,” who were affected. Brown elaborated that while the issue doesn’t affect her own children, it affects children whose parents don’t have the means to put them in a better school.
“It is happening to the most vulnerable people in our society who do not have [school] choice, who cannot move, who cannot afford to take their kid out of school, who have no other school to put them into,” she said.
When schools aren’t held accountable, wealthy families move to a different school. Without school choice programs, students in poor families get trapped in schools with abusive teachers.
“Anyone objectively looking at this recognizes this problem,” Brown said. “There are no two sides to this debate. This is a moral issue with a right side and a wrong side.”
Brown told the story of how she got involved in education reform after finding out that teachers who had sexually abused students were still working in New York State schools.
“I thought, ‘Okay, no way is this true. This is too crazy. This is absurd. This can’t be possible,'” she said.
Numerous FOIA requests later, Brown found overwhelming evidence that it was true. “I thought to myself, ‘If anybody knew that this was happening, they would be marching in the streets. This should be on the front page of every paper in the country,'” Brown said.
But when Brown tried to get the law repealed, only one state senator sponsored the proposed bill. “It made me realize how truly crazy the system is, how screwed up it really is,” Brown said. So Brown turned to the legal system for justice.
“They are going to lose, it’s just a question of when,” Brown said.
By far, most educators are not abusive and deserve to be judged on the merits of their teaching. At a bare minimum, the law should ensure that dangerous teachers don’t get paid for abusing students.
