Friday, Sep 5, 2008
Jack Erb, superintendent of the Peoria School District, swears that the district's decision had nothing to do with the threat of a lawsuit, and claims that he didn't see the lawyer's letter until after they had decided to retest the student. "It isn't an issue; people threaten us all the time and most the time they don't follow through with it," he says. He posits that the decision to retest the student was based on a quirk in Joice's curriculum and grading system.
But after outraged parents and teachers from across the state sent furious letters to the local papers, complaining that the student shouldn't have been granted special privileges, the district finally offered a general apology for its "lack of clear and appropriately enforced internal guidelines regarding grading and curriculum standards." It said nothing about the legal threats, however. (The lawyer, in turn, is now being investigated by the state board of Arizona as to whether his veiled threats to Joice were ethical.)
Regardless of whether the district ultimately caved because it feared a lawsuit, the entire affair draws into relief the conflict currently taking place in classrooms across the country. Higher standards linked to higher stakes for schools have caused educators to be more rigorous. Concerned parents, facing tougher college entrance requirements for their kids, panic when their children falter, often blaming the teachers and schools for their children's failures. The result, of late, is lawsuits, or, most often, threats of lawsuits.
An astounding 25 percent of all secondary schools were involved with lawsuits of all sorts -- from accidental injuries to discipline squabbles -- between 1997 and 1999, according to a 1999 survey by the American Tort Reform Association -- a huge increase over the decade before. While some of these lawsuits were no doubt justifiable, there is no shortage of egregious litigation: Legal expert Walter Olson's site Overlawyered.com, which chronicles legal ugliness in schools in order to point out the frivolous nature of American litigiousness, lists dozens of overzealous-parent lawsuits similar to threats in Peoria.
There was the lawsuit, for example, filed by 15-year-old Elizabeth Smith in Bath Township, Ohio, who sued her school district and 11 teachers in 2000 for $6 million, claiming that her grades were unfair. The school had lowered her grades because of frequent absences and tardiness, which the Smith family blamed on "chronic tonsillitis" and the fact that she stayed home to put her siblings on the school bus. Meanwhile, in Riverside, Calif., a football player sued his former high school teachers at Murrieta Valley High School for giving him grades that were too high: He claimed that his education suffered because they cut him too much slack so that he could play football.
School discipline is another area where teachers and parents struggle for the upper hand. Lacey Renfro, a high school student in Tennessee, sued the cheerleading coach after she was suspended from a game for disciplinary reasons; Justin Swindler in Pennsylvania sued because he was expelled for soliciting a hit man via his Web site to kill his English teacher; and a father in Tennessee sued two teachers after they confiscated his son's yo-yo on a school trip where toys had been expressly forbidden.
Olson, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, explains that, in the past, most schoolyard litigation grew out of incidents in which kids were barred from sports teams, or fell on the playground, or felt that they were discriminated against under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. It is rare that a simple grading squabble, such as the one in Peoria, will make it all the way to a court case -- in part because of a 1978 Supreme Court ruling that held that courts shouldn't second-guess a school on academic decisions (those grading squabbles that do make it all the way to lawsuits are usually under the purview of the Disabilities Act -- i.e.: "My kid was disabled and deserved special treatment.")
This doesn't mean that parents still don't threaten lawsuits over grades, however. Olson increasingly hears from school administrators who have received legal threats because of grading complaints and discipline issues. Few of these cases, he says, emerge in the media. "My guess is that the sort of strong-arming seen in the [Peoria] case is not in fact all that rare, but that the great majority of disputes never result in formal court filings and never result in publicity because neither side seeks it," he explains.
Pressure exerted behind the scenes tends to be more insidious than the interaction involved in public lawsuits, which, because they are argued in the open, lack some of the more vicious personal threats and allegations. In Washington D.C., for example, a teacher at the competitive Wilson Senior High School recently discovered that in at least 11 cases, student grades had been raised without the teacher's knowledge, apparently by an administrator who had felt pressured to help the students graduate (although no one has confessed to the act). Teachers who had flunked their students were appalled to see those same students walking across the stage at graduation.
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