Even if only a few people have been paying attention and many seem to ignore the information and reminders when supplied, this coming May ends not just a chapter in my life, but the end of the book if you take the whole situation as a complete and separate sequence of events with a beginning, a body of events, and a measurable end point.
I have remained silent about one aspect of the events, but, after all this time, I think it safe to open up and, perhaps union leaders will learn something.
Although my 2009 Civil Court case was ostensibly about my claim that I had been wrongfully dismissed from my teaching position as it was based on fabricated evidence and documentation, it would have had a broader application to all teachers if the union leadership did not get mired in the Gay teacher getting fired part of it, but saw how the Gay teacher was fired and how the process, applied as it was to many teachers, had unfairly arrived at that conclusion.
As it was, the reluctance of Union leadership to take on such a case was the fear that by defending a Gay teacher with it being in the Buckle of the Bible Belt, members would leave the union and weaken it. But I was a dues-paying member who had been on the Union’s executive board and very active in Union activities and, having had years of experience in Union activity and leadership in other places, I knew as a member, the Union really had no choice in taking my case, although the depth of their efforts in it was up to them.
Initially I received more excuses why my case would be a loser and why the district certainly would not be so careless as to leave such an easily followed paper trail exposing their machinations. Internally the case was seen as a nuisance that just needed to go away and the union hired an outside attorney who knew of my situation and wanted to pursue it. He saw the full value of the case but was as successful as I was in getting the Union leadership to see what the case actually meant.
Although by contract a teacher cannot be dismissed without just cause, which means any accusation upon which the dismissal is based must be accompanied by evidence to support that, what the contract does not cover is how this evidence is collected and how it is reviewed both in closed and open sessions of the school board.
The process had generally been that if for whatever reason beyond gross and obvious incompetence an administrator wanted a teacher dismissed be it political, religious, or personal differences, or the administrator would like the job open to someone with whom they have a bond such as a friend or relative, in lieu of real evidence, what they needed would be fabricated.
Meanwhile, after collecting what the administration considered evidence, the teachers would be shown the evidence and given the option to go before the board and deal with accusations and defenses in public, potentially losing their appeal, and being unable to get another job in the field because of the dismissal and the reasons for it on their record.
The other option offered to teachers was the chance for avoiding all that by simply accepting the dismissal quietly and leaving, maintaining control of the narrative until they left if their dismissal was not immediate, and gossip began. In exchange for this silent departure, all the documents except the good ones on file would be handed to the teacher to destroy and even really bad teachers could get employment elsewhere.
Even if the evidence was so totally fabricated as to be obviously so, this was usually the one chosen because the administration of the district controlled the hearing according to a process that prevented a teacher from presenting evidence the administration thought might disprove their charges or answering questions about things that needed clarification. Prior to the hearing, all the teacher’s evidence had to be handed over to the administration’s attorney who would excise any evidence in favor of the teacher and return what remained to the teacher or the teacher’s representative, if there was one, and was the only evidence the teacher was allowed to present.
There were other procedural actions that were allowed and disallowed such as who could speak and who could answer questions during a dismissal hearing, but the application of the rules was dependent on how the situation would affect the mostly predetermined outcome.
With teachers quietly leaving, this system was never exposed until the Gay teacher decided not to go quietly and fought the dismissal in court where raw, unredacted evidence could be presented to the judge without administrative editing.
When the Gay teacher won both at the district and appellate court levels, the union leadership was glad the Gay stuff was over, and they could move on. What they failed to see was that when the standard procedure was challenged, all that it was based on was exposed, and, therefore, being so exposed could be ended and a fairer and more just process would have to be devised that did not victimize teachers.
In spite of prevailing in both courts, thereby showing his dismissal was wrongful and based on fabrication, this teacher could not return to his previous assignment from which he had been wrongfully removed because, assuming they would prevail in the district court, instead of holding the position open by filling it with a substitute, they had hired a full time teacher and it would be mean of the Gay teacher, the person who won the case to be re-instated, to have that new teacher transferred to another school.
The administration also claimed that his return would be bad for morale, although they never stated whose, the administration who lost the case and had their methods exposed, or the teachers who would see that one of them prevailed.
By contract, regardless of the administration’s hiring hubris, the teacher was to be returned to the position he had before his wrongful dismissal, but going along with this, the Union leadership had no problem having this teacher who had just proven his competence as a teacher in court sent to a high school that was in the final year of at-risk status and which at the end of the year would go through a required reformation beginning with only 50% of the teachers allowed to remain, the rest having to find jobs at other schools, work as substitutes, or go to another school district.
If the school district truly believed the teacher was incompetent, it was questionable why he would be sent to a failing school in need of good teachers.
In spite of having only been at the new school for only three-fourths of the year, getting good evaluations of his teaching performance, and having other members of the English department adopting his method of teaching vocabulary, the teacher was put on the list of those not to be retained. The principal, rightfully, chose to keep teachers with experience at the school and often made the tough decision which of two good teachers should be kept, the newer or the more experienced one.
As a result of this, not only had he not been returned to his original school and classroom assignment where such a school rating was avoided by good student achievement scores partially due to his student’s measurable performance on required standardized tests, he had been sent to a high school that was in its fifth year as a failing school with its complete overhaul inevitable, resulting in him, in spite of his performance, having to find another school that would take him, reduce his position from full time teacher to substitute, or go elsewhere.
This was perfectly fine with union leadership.
He should be happy he had a teaching position if he got one.
He, along with a number of non-retained teachers, secured a position at another high school which was in its second year of rebuilding after having been rated as a failed school, and that meant there would be a new school-wide approach to things that the teachers already on campus had had a year of training in, while those arriving new to the school had none.
New teachers that year were required to abandon any previously successful approaches they had used in class and begin using the new methods required of all teachers based on all the training workshops the previous year. The new teachers had to attend all the meetings and workshops concerning training in the second half of the new approach while playing catch up in what the older faculty had training in the year before on their own.
They would be evaluated on how well they applied the new method and were held to the same level of mastery of the new method as those with training.
The new teachers, having come from elsewhere, relied on what they knew when approaching their classes dovetailing in the new approaches as they learned them to be eventually up to speed, but found their evaluations were being based on the principal’s criteria requiring them to already be up to speed.
They also noticed some odd practices and asked questions, and this was inconvenient for the principal.
By contract, if a teacher is deemed to need a plan for improvement because of poor performance, the teacher and administrator were to design it together making it relevant to that particular teacher. Obviously, the plan for improvement for a math teacher would be different for that of an English teacher.
However, in this case, just as with what had happened at his original high school, when the Gay teacher was handed his already written plan and told to sign it, the principal claimed the signature fulfilled the requirement of teacher input. Beyond that, each teacher who received a plan of improvement by the end of the first semester, and it was the majority of the faculty, regardless of subject taught or what grade level, got plans for improvement that were the same, word for word, with a common failing being failure to keep accurate grades and attendance.
Because of his past experiences as a Union building representative in a variety of cities over the years, the Gay teacher had developed the habit of collecting documentation at the first questionable act of an administrator in relation to the contract. One practice was to make photocopies of the week’s gradebook and daily attendance as back up because these were all entered on computer, and computers can crash.
When receiving his plan for improvement, the teacher was shown pages from his allegedly poorly kept computer grade book and sloppy attendance recording on the principal’s office computer screen, and in some cases it was noticeable immediately because of the grades of some students, and the obviously incorrect attendance dates what was being shown did not match his hard copies or changes had been made. He later went and ran off the principal computer pages to compare with the originals and the paper attendance and grade book that was not required, but he kept in his desk for his own records and whose existence was unknown to anyone else and saw the discrepancies.
In the first attempt to dismiss him, one of the charges was that he kept poor records, but the trial had revealed that the administrator responsible for his evaluations had gone onto his attendance and grade book page on the district’s teacher tool webpage without his knowledge and played around with grades and attendance changing some in the process and then using those changes as evidence of poor record keeping. No one was aware at that time that he had a second hardcopy grade and attendance book and that he ran off his computer attendance and grades weekly.
Having these records questioned again had raised a red flag.
Both his printed computer pages and his hand-written records matched. The principals did not.
He also discovered that in his case, and, as it turned out in others, on the most minor of transgressions, the simplest violation of a procedure, such as forgetting to lock the classroom door at the beginning of class, was not addressed in an informal way with the teacher, but, rather was mentioned in e-mails, copies of which were sent to central administration personnel before a teacher was even aware there was such a transgression. Forgetting to lock a door one day in a semester did not require notification to central administration, just a reminder to the teacher to make sure his door was locked.
The principal then notified Union leadership claiming he had evidence to show the teacher was, actually, incompetent and he would be requesting the Board to dismiss him. In response the Union leadership decided the district court and the appellate court wins were pure luck, so they would not invest time or money in a case whose luck might run out at the Supreme Court level to which the district wanted to take the matter.
In spite of the Gay teacher then showing the Union leadership the evidence he had that exposed the principal’s questionable actions and the violations of the contract regarding teacher evaluations and plans for improvement, the Union president supported the claims of the principal and, missing a huge red flag, made his decision not to defend the teacher any further.
He had won his case, was assigned to a classroom, so it was over as far as leadership was concerned.
The teacher could not afford to pursue the case on his own and saw that this unnecessary prolongation of the case was a distraction from the actual issue—the safety of Gay kids in school—keeping attention on him rather than his goal.
The teacher agreed to leave the district to both end the distraction from the real issue and save the taxpayer money being spent solely for the administration to put off accepting defeat. He got a fully paid administrative leave until the end of the school year, received $4,354 for his accumulated sick leave because he would not accept the pittance teachers were given upon retirement for all unused sick and personal days, and a special arrangement with the state for an early retirement pension that was an extremely rare thing.
He did agree to the administration stipulation that he never teach in the city again, step on any school property without prior permission, or take any further action on this situation unless the district did.
What he did not agree to was never telling his story publicly, a sort of Non- Disclosure Agreement.
The union got $24,000 in attorney fees for the cost of the trial and the initial appeal and defense.
The month after the teacher had left the system, both the principal and the Union president attended a conference on teacher evaluations at which the principal declared,
“We must have all highly effective teachers. We can’t even have average teachers. Across the country, at our persistently low-performing schools, you are going to see something like this,”
before offering as proof of his seriousness that he had started the 2010-11 school year with 55 teachers and “exited” (fired) all but 15 of them, using an evaluation system that set expectations high and held teachers accountable.
In spite of the Union president having seen the evidence and should have recognized these lofty ideals and his achieving them was based on an abuse of the evaluation system and teachers, the president of the Union praised the principal’s achievement in eliminating Union members under questionable procedures saying,
“We were really disappointed on the number of teachers who flat out said ‘We’re not doing it.”
The “it” was the new methodologies ,full training in which was denied to the teachers who arrive at the beginning of the second year of instruction on the new program and had to learn the previous year’s training on their own, and there was no refusal, but, rather, constant requests for that training that were ignored or at least the acknowledgement that new teachers could not possibly master that of which they had no knowledge and should be given the opportunity to catch up.
The Union president agreed with the principal that the teachers were refusing to comply with the requirement to use the new method when in reality, they were attempting to apply it as they learned it.
He also supported the principal’s claim that he employed an evaluation system that set expectations high and held teachers accountable in spite of the documentation he had been shown.
It was decided at the conference at which the principal was a star that attendees would hear about different ways to quantitatively evaluate teachers, in part using student test score results.
The Union president was aware of the grade changing. He had been informed of this and shown the documents among them what had been collected while the Gay teacher had been attempting to have his senior students apply for a local foundation grant toward their college. The students only needed to fill out a form, write an essay, and include their transcripts. As he had each student bring their information in individual envelopes to be placed in a single large envelope on a set day that the teacher would drop off at the foundation on the way home since he drove right by the foundation’s headquarters, he found as he photocopied each transcript, front and back, as a backup copy in case one was needed that the majority of his students had not taken the required standardized test before graduation with very little time and opportunity to take them all before graduation. With all his senior classes labelled “Honors English” there should be no reason to have allowed honors students’ exemptions to a state requirement. Some had taken some tests, the majority none
Of course, any college receiving an application from any graduate of that school would be more than happy to accept honors students. Test scores and real grades would have shown this title was bestowed in spite of actual academic achievement, but without them, the label alone, as deceitful as it was, helped with college admission but had future college disaster written all over it.
The principal had a scam going regarding student achievement but evidence of this was ignored and all those teachers with plans of improvement and who were “exited” were disgraced and their departure misrepresented.
A year later, after the teacher had left the system and moved out of state to be closer to his elderly father, the teacher received an email from an unknown attorney hoping he had some of the records that the students and faculty who thought he was a little off about collecting now found was needed for an important investigation.
He sent hard copies and digital copies of everything he had shown the Union leadership.
In the time between his departure and the phone call, Students and some faculty had called for an investigation because students had found when they got to college that they had not received an education.
An investigation found that the principal made an “extremely high” number of unauthorized grade changes between 2009 and 2012 without informing teachers of them.
Along with changing failing grades to passing ones, the district hired independent attorney who investigated the claims against the principal found he had been reporting false attendance to the central office and had been giving students credits for classes they weren’t even in.
The report stated the principal “did not comply with board policy” in changing grades or documenting changes and there no policies that no policies “authorized the grade changes.”
The principal could not prove his claim that his grade changes were the result of teacher requests or for any other reason because he “was not able to produce records relating to these grade changes, and therefore, little documented proof exists”, according to the report.
It was found that at the end of school year after the teacher had left the district that approximately 68 seniors, his students, had had their transcripts altered to include grades and credit “in courses for which the students had not registered and for there is no record that they had taken,” courses needed to meet certain graduation requirements.
One student who was not on his roster at any time, one whom he had never met and who acknowledged she had never met or spoken to him, found she had an A in senior English without ever having attended a class she had not been enrolled in.
The principal had not only changed teachers’ attendance records, but he did so “by the frequent and excessive withdrawals of students” and “dropping students from the rolls” before they reached required attendance thresholds.
While the Union leadership was happy to go along with the principal’s machinations in spite of having been shown the evidence that the evaluation system for teachers was being abused and teachers could find themselves potentially liable for falsely manipulating attendance and falsely recording grades while being totally unaware of any grade and attendance changes, the former employees’ and students’ had filed a complaint against the school district with the U.S. Department of Education, one that the Union, had it not been so dismissive of the Gay Thing should have filed for the sake of the teachers.
Employees had been wrongfully terminated when they spoke out about the principal’s questionable practices, something the Union leadership was comfortable with.
As a result, where this could have been done by the Union, the complacent community rallied around the students and the school, and the district implemented several safeguards to assure that student records are accurate including training for counselors, ongoing transcript reviews, and new technology that offers an additional layer of checks and balances.
The principal is gone.
But so are the teachers wrongfully dismissed and the students who began finding in their post high school life that they really were not given a decent education.
Sitting 1,781 miles away on the patio of a house on Cape Cod, the teacher got a phone call informing him that all the evidence he had given to the attorneys that he had first presented to the Union which chose to ignore it, had been the necessary documentation to seal the case against the principal. Until those documents had arrived all the attorney had was anecdotal evidence but nothing tangible. The Union had been shown the documents and had ignored them for at least three years and probably never admitting they had been made aware of the problem but chose inaction.
It has been twelve years since the union saw and ignored potent evidence, and a few less since the investigation determined that the fired teachers whose dismissals the Union leadership accepted as proof of the principals’ effectiveness, had been wrongful.
Perhaps, they are owed compensation from the district that dismissed them and the Union leadership and by extension the Union who refused to fight these dismissals.
But certainly there is a question as to why, in spite of having been shown the evidence later used in an investigation that found the abuse of teacher evaluations, manipulation of grades to have it look like the principal with his leadership and his methodologies had increased the school’s graduation rate and had increased the number of students accepted into colleges, and attendance changes that deceived people who needed accurate records, the Union chose to do nothing.
He had won his case, had been instrumental in others winning theirs, and knew the teachers had the wherewithal to have the evaluation system less corrupt, but the Union would not look.
There was one person who observe all this and took action. The Republican governor of the state was so angry that a lowly teacher, and a Gay one at that, had won in district court because she believed teachers were evaluated honestly and all dismissals were proper without looking at the details, that she advocated for and got the Republican led legislature to eliminate the Trial de Novo law which the teacher had use to get to district court and exonerate himself. He had been one of two teachers since that law came into existence to have used it and the only one of the two to win. So, based on one teacher prevailing in court, teachers can no longer challenge a dismissal in the that manner and must accept the School Board’s decision no matter how fabricated the justifications for the dismissal are or how many violations to its own established procedures the Board members committed during the dismissal hearing such as, in this case, improper voting.
The burden of proof in a dismissal hearing is on the administration to present solid evidence that the board would accept as valid and strong. The teacher did not have that burden of proof, only having to show the weakness of the evidence without presenting his own case. If the administration did not present a strong enough case, the vote was to go toward the teacher’s retention. However, on the night of the dismissal hearing, one member left before the vote, another abstained which was not included in Board established procedure, and two members, after admitting that neither side had presented a strong case, a requirement of only one side, voted to support the administration in a clear violation of procedure, one made more ironic by one of the charges against the teacher being that he, allegedly, did not follow all procedures 100% of the time.
Meanwhile the Gay teacher had to supplement the meager early retirement pension he got from Oklahoma with a retail job at a discount outlet on Cape Cod until he could apply for Social Security.
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