Apropos Orin's post, consider whether you agree or disagree with the following excerpt from Judge Easterbrook in Wales v. Bd. of Ed., 120 F.3d 82, 85 (7th Cir. 1997):
The Dorothy deLacey Early Childhood Education Center is among a handful of schools in the United States that permit even the youngest pupils to pick their own fields of study. The school district that operates the deLacey Center tells us that if a pupil shows an interest in rabbits, the teacher must design a curriculum for that pupil around rabbits -- while other kids in the same classroom try to learn reading and arithmetic through materials on fire engines and dinosaurs. Since its founding the Center has catered to children with special educational needs. In the fall of 1992 the deLacey Center became an "inclusion facility." Pupils with learning disabilities or behavior problems were mixed with those whose challenges were less severe....
[Kindergarten teacher Colleen] Wales was not happy with the turn of events at the deLacey Center.... By November 1992, ... it seemed to Wales that her time was devoted more to self-defense from hyperactive kids than to instruction. Wales called for assistance in managing her class more often than did other teachers. She succeeded in having one child removed from class and sent elsewhere. Schumacher turned down Wales's request for the removal of a second child. Wales promptly took a medical leave and sent Schumacher a lengthy memorandum protesting her management of the deLacey Center. Its final two paragraphs convey the tenor:
Under my contractual obligations with the district, I was employed to serve as a teacher, not as a guard in a detention room. In addition, I have professional and legal obligations to ensure the safety of my students and to provide them with a positive learning environment. This cannot be accomplished under the present lack of procedure and/or lack of complying with established procedure in terms of discipline for students who cannot or will not comply with accepted norms of behavior in a regular classroom setting. In addition, I do not have to expect that being a punching bag for a student is an assigned job task of a teacher.
As such, I would like some form of written documentation and/or clarification, consistent with state statute, as to what actions/procedures will be enacted in order to perform/maintain discipline within the classroom as well as what actions will be taken to ensure that other students, as well as myself, will not be subjected to continued physical abuse without repercussions. As an employee of the district, I feel that it is only right that procedures be clarified and followed through, especially now that the situation has deteriorated to one where my personal health has been affected.
[Soon afterwards, Wales's contract was not renewed; Wales argues it was partly because of her speech. -EV] ...
A school is entitled to insist that its staff carry out the educational philosophy espoused by the elected school board and the principal the board appoints. A Montessori school need not employ teachers who hanker for stern discipline. A memorandum proclaiming support for a disfavored educational approach (removing or disciplining disruptive kids) may be useful to a school in determining how a teacher runs her classroom.
When a communication is simultaneously protected speech (as a call to the public to change the way the schools run) and a sound reason for an employer to act (when it reveals information relevant to performance on the job), it is essential to determine how the speech has been taken into account. Did the school district penalize an expression of views about how the schools ought to run (forbidden) or consider an expression that revealed how the teacher manages or wants to manage her own class (permitted)? ...
Rational employers routinely consider speech: think about a local treasurer's reaction to a subordinate's statement (in private, to avoid disruption) along the lines of "Everyone in this office is underpaid and entitled to steal what he can." ... A school district is entitled to put in its classrooms teachers who share its educational philosophy. This does not mean that Wales is a bad teacher; it reflects only the school district's judgment that she was not well suited to an "inclusion facility" .... Matching a person's skills to the job at hand is a difficult yet vital task for any employer, and the first amendment did not require defendants to retain at the deLacey Center someone they believed was not best for the children.
Related Posts (on one page):
- Speech/Ideology as Evidence of Likely Job Performance:
- Should Ideology Play any Role in Hiring for DOJ Career Positions?:
I think this is a pedantic example on the part of the judge, of using the law to suit one's purpose. While semantically he may be correct, his ruling has eclipsed &nullified the spirit of the law and that of the statement made by the teacher, as to it's fundamental intent.
Rulings such as these, serve only to further the chasm between those who can afford justice and those who cannot. I'm reasonably sure that I can assume, on a teacher's salary, she was not inclined to consult a lawyer before she wrote that letter. Rather, it was an emotion-driven response based on her frustration over the current circumstances. Although she was not inarticulate, unfortunately for her, she did not have a thorough understanding of legal semantics even though her intent was crystal clear.
While it may be correct to take a law student to task for being somewhat ambiguous, as it will serve to benefit him for the purposes of his profession; it is an undue burden to impose on the average Joe, who did not spend 4 years in law school, to penalize them for an unfortunately structured complaint. Had she merely re-phrased her complaint to be a little more clear on the impact the situation was having on her students, rather than implied such impact (while naturally being preoccupied with the effects the situation was having on herself), in addition to casting a wider net in regards to her target audience, she would've been validated by the courts, as evinced by the above statement.
The validity of the impetus for the letter to the supervisor &resulting actions taken to have her removed from her position were never in question as they pertain to her rights to seek a legal remedy, it was her mis-step of ambiguity which was the sole reason for denial of justice. I find that reprehensible.
It was obvious that she was fired because of her letter to her supervisor and the judge made it clear that she was not given recompense for that action because of her failure to articulate her position to a level which satisfied him.
Not so. She referred to the interests of the other pupils.
Now, the teacher would have liked to have things changed in the classroom--that was the point of the letter--but that wasn't to be. Since she had no right to see that things were changed in the classroom, what is the basis of her suit? That she was punished for speech? I think it was obvious that she was only "punished" for her confessed inability to teach in the environment provided to her.
I really don't see this case as a protected vs. unprotected speech issue at all.
When he mentioned: "Although . . . [the teacher's] complaints addressed a subject of general in- terest to the public, her claim still fails as a matter of law because her expression was addressed only to the personal impact of those issues on [her]. Her speech was thus intended to benefit only her personal interests in a private dispute with her employer." 42 F.3d at 409. he superfluously opened up another can of worms.
Why did the judge mention that at all, when they had made their case with the assertion as John says, of her "confessed inability to teach in the environment provided to her"? That right there negates the facilitation by the plaintiff, of playing the First Amendment card. Why go any further?
When the judge mentioned the above quote regarding the manner in which the letter represented more the personal impact of the complainant than the students, he implied that had she been more judicious in her letter writing, she could've won her case based on violation of First Amendment rights.
Like I've stated previously, I'm not a law student or anything of the kind. I am taking a particular interest in the law these days for personal reasons and I'm in here to get an education, so I welcome conflicts and disputes ...just be mindful of my handicap &don't chew me up and spit me out please :)
This has nothing to do with being rich enough to hire a lawyer. Obviously this woman was just angry and indignant about her job and sent a letter complaining about it. Common sense would have told her it might harm her employment prospects. Had she written the sort of letter that a normal person might have thought would be protected, e.g., a nice polite letter explaining why she thought another policy would be superior, it sounds like she would have been in the clear. Besides, it's not like she would have had any protection from retaliation if she worked at a private institution.
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As an aside I'm really troubled by the idea of educating special needs children with the rest of the class. For starters I very much doubt the ability of the teachers to prevent or even notice the other children's poor treatment of special needs children. The treatment of other kids can be pretty rough even as a normal child and despite the teacher's attempts to protect them it looked like it was even worse for the special ed kids in my high school.
However, my real problem is that I suspect this policy fails a cost/benefit analysis. I tend to think that the two biggest external determiners of child's educational achievement are the level of challenge and the abilities/attitudes of their classmates. Studies show that kids in honors classes do better than those in regular classes and I suspect the difference is that the kids feel more is expected of them. My fear is that the inclusion of special needs kids in regular classes will impede the educational progress of the other children. Even if the benefit to the special needs kids is great the societal payoff for each extra unit of education for the smart/gifted children is orders or magnitude more than that for the special needs child.
Maybe I'm totally off the mark but that's my worry at least.
I'm not arguing that the employer can never change conditions, but some conditions can't reasonably be changed in the short term and some aren't ever reasonable. As an example of the latter, the teacher complains about kids being allowed to hit her. Depending on exactly what is involved here, this could easily be the kind of thing a teacher shouldn't have to put up with period, not a feature of a certain educational philosophy. As an example of the former, if a school hires a teacher to work in a Montessori classroom and then puts her in a "traditional" (strict, rote memorization etc.), those jobs are arguably sufficiently different that what the school district has done is a breach of contract. Even if it isn't, it may well be something that requires accomodation.
To make things clearer, suppose a school hires me to teach grade 12 AP calculus, then assigns me to teach music to fourth graders, for which I am totally unqualified. That's not only a dumb decision on the part of the school, but it is unfair to me. I'm entitled to a job assignment close to what I was hired for, and if they suddenly find that they can't do that, I'm entitled to compensation for their breach of contract.
Now, I agree that matters of educational philosophy and approach are often murkier than grade 12 AP calculus vs. grade 4 music. In some cases, the difference is small enough that it is reasonable to ask the teacher to make the change. In others, it isn't.
I generally think that the cannot-be-fired-for-speech cases have gone to far, and whether or not a person can be fired should not depend on fine distinctions or require people to hire lawyers to word letters of complaint just so
Bill, could the assault be seen as evidence of her inability to teach under the philosophy of the school?
It seems to me that in this case, the district changed the rules (and terms of employment) to remove basic employee safety precautions. I think she would have been better served going the OSHA route.