L is for lawsuit

One of those students had been in the Spanish class of teacher Anexora Skvirsky, who had given her a generous D -- and was promptly threatened by the student's father. Although she held her ground against the parent at the time, a year later someone in the administration apparently did not. Although Svirsky has been teaching for 19 years, she says it's only been in the last few years that she's witnessed such "an incredible advocacy" on the part of parents. Although she's never received a legal threat, parents regularly try to get her fired by complaining to the principal.

"It is hellish," she says. "So many times I've had stomachaches, headaches, insomnia, because a parent would call and try to intimidate me or complain about me to the principal with a letter."

Skvirsky places the guilt for the 11 anonymous grade changes squarely on the shoulders of the school's administrators, who she says regularly cave to powerful parents who "move mountains by just complaining." This, say teacher advocacy groups, is becoming a common occurrence, particularly in schools with rigorous academics and demanding parents.

"I'm afraid Peoria is not an anomaly; it's not commonplace but it's not unusual for teachers to be told to change grades," says Mitchell of the American Federation of Teachers. "In most cases the teacher refuses to do it and the administrator does it over their protestations."

But this is not a totally new phenomenon, either. According to Kathleen Lyons, spokesperson for the National Education Foundation, the occasional case in which unhappy parents threatened teachers with lawsuits and retribution if grades weren't raised has always existed. The difference now is that behavior of the last resort has become almost routine.

"There have always been some parents who want a special deal for their child," Lyons says. "There's nothing new there, except that a higher-stakes educational environment and the high stakes of standardized testing has led to high stress. Parents now know it does make a difference how your kids do in school.

"I think there's a lot more riding on it," she adds, "and that does tend to bring out the worst in people: When the stakes are high, you find transgressions."

One solution is to completely standardize education -- testing, grading and discipline -- so that there is no wiggle room in the system for outraged parents and their lawyers. But that resolution already has prompted other kinds of parent lawsuits -- in California and Texas -- that claim that the system is too rigid, and discriminates against their children's special needs.

Worse, total standardization can extinguish all creativity from the classroom. In Peoria, where the school district has reacted to the controversy by writing a new series of standardized rules for the classroom, Joice worries that teachers are ultimately going to become automatons. "We may not be able to be as creative with the units we use, which will be a travesty because every teacher has a specialty and if we can't share that with our students, if it's all black and white, then that's sad," she says. "If that's the case, why they don't just put computers out in the classroom as teachers?"

Even in districts that haven't bowed to pressure with standardized grading, the fear of lawsuits and parental retribution has undermined school programs and teachers' daily routines. Twenty percent of the respondents to the American Tort Reform Association survey, for example, reported spending five to 10 hours a week in meetings or documenting every little action they took with a student, in case of future litigation.

"It takes a lot of time to document everything: You have to document conversations, what you did, what the kids said in class," says Joice. "It will take more effort on the part of teachers if they want to stand up and say what happened."

Besides the simple question of time, lawsuits also come at a high cost for school districts and teachers: even a frivolous lawsuit over a grading dispute, which might be thrown out after just one hearing, can cost $10,000 in lawyers fees. School districts do have liability insurance, of course, as do teachers (some professional teachers organizations, such as the Texas State Teacher's Association, lure members with the promise of $6 million in liability insurance for those moments when "people are reacting with emotion rather than reason"). But that costs money, too.

"Lawsuits have become a great cost for school districts," says Julie Underwood, general counsel for the National School Boards Association. "The entire sub-specialty of education law didn't exist 25 years ago, and now it's a big, recognized sub-specialty. You can't keep track of the number of times that someone comes in to a principal's office and says, 'If you don't do this, I'll sue you.' It's just so commonplace." In fact, she says, all principals now have to undergo education-law classes before they can receive certification.

Finally, the students risk both the quality of their education and their faith in the system. Kids with lackluster achievement records who nevertheless head off to college with satisfactory grades thanks to Mom's strong-arm tactics are probably not going to make it far in higher education. Their classmates, who actually worked hard for their grades, will probably be demoralized too.

"It undermines the hard work of other kids in the classroom, when they see standards change for one student. It erodes the standards, when we really want students to know that standards are meaningful. And for students involved, it really cheats them of a meaningful experience," says Mitchell. "Sometimes failure is the best teacher a student could have."

This story has been corrected since it was first published.

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