A post from guest blogger and Fordham writer and researcher Emmy Partin. 

Common sense prevailed today in the Buckeye State with a court ruling that dismisses the latest legal shenanigan of charter-school foes here. Last September, then-state Attorney General Marc Dann sued to close a handful of charter schools on the grounds that their poor academic performance and overall mismanagement put them out of compliance with the state’s charitable trust laws.  Montgomery County Common Pleas Judge Michael Tucker disagrees:

“This court concludes... that New Choices [charter school] is a political subdivision. Given this conclusion, there is simply no charitable trust role for the Attorney General either by statute or at common law.”

As we noted when the case was first announced, Dann’s lawsuits were never about rescuing kids from bad schools. They were political maneuvering, pure and simple.  E-mails revealed that the legal strategy was offered to him by his cronies at the Ohio Education Association. And the OEA, in return for Dann’s filing the suits, agreed to drop its own lawsuit against the state for allegedly failing to monitor charter schools properly. With today’s ruling and the fact that Dann resigned from office amid scandal last spring, they are sure to be rethinking that decision.

We’re no apologists for lousy public schools (district or charter), of which Ohio has too many-especially in the urban centers.  Last school year, 51 percent of students in Ohio’s eight biggest cities attended a school rated D or F by the state. Fordham laid out recommendations in 2006 for addressing underperforming charter schools, and again this month called on Ohio to be more aggressive in closing bad charter schools. We’ve even provided ideas for how to do this in a way that is fair, transparent, and legal.

Ohio’s scarce resources shouldn’t be spent on law firms and courtrooms but in classrooms. Instead of continuing to fight against the mere existence of charter schools, traditional districts and their allies in the General Assembly and statewide office should be seeking ways to work with and learn from the good ones like we see happening in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and just down the highway in Indianapolis.

There’s a lot of political lip-service of late given to ridding schools of bad teachers. But be aware if you’re looking to do so in Dallas. A 30-year veteran teacher was fired due in part to low ratings on the “Classroom Effectiveness Index,” a value-added evaluation instrument. All of this started back in August when a handful of teachers were let go at the veteran teacher’s school. DISD spokesman John Dahlander explained,

If their TAKS rates are low, and they are not even reaching the levels that other teachers are reaching, then they may be recommended for termination. That falls into a small subset of teachers, but it does happen.

Apparently not, John. Seems there’s a huge difference between recommending termination and said termination actually happening. The  teacher petitioned the Texas Education Agency Commissioner to be reinstated and, low and behold, she’s back (with back pay). The Commissioner found (a la Broader and Bolder) that the school environment and student discipline problems were to blame for the teacher’s firing, not the teacher’s performance. Ugh.

According to 2003-2004 NCES data, only 1.9 percent of our nation’s public school teachers with more than 3 years of experience were dismissed or didn’t have their contracts renewed due to poor performance. Is it any wonder?

Louisiana’s new anti-evolution law may be challenged in the courts.

Speaking of legal issues in schools.... According to Education Week:

A federal appeals court has ordered an Illinois school district to allow a student to wear a T-shirt proclaiming “Be Happy, Not Gay” to protest a high school event meant to promote tolerance of gay students.

First, one struggles to understand Judge Posner’s thinking when he writes, “‘Be Happy, Not Gay’ is only tepidly negative; ‘derogatory’ or ‘demeaning’ seems too strong a characterization.” Seems that “derogatory” exactly describes such a slogan. Is a sartorial expression of “Be Happy. Not Italian” (or whatever) similarly “tepidly negative”?

Possibly it is by Judge Posner’s thinking, which he elucidated in his decision by writing, “People do not have a legal right to prevent criticism of their beliefs or, for that matter, their way of life.” One suspects that lots of people wouldn’t classify homosexuality as a belief, akin to Christianity or global warming or that Miley Cyrus is better than Bach, but as an immutable thing—like skin-color or ethnicity. It’s good to protect everyone’s right to challenge beliefs, generally speaking. But should students have a protected right, in school, to challenge the validity of another student’s being?

Second, and more importantly: Why is Judge Posner even bothering with this? Why is any judge? The answer, of course, is that Tinker established all sorts of k-12 student rights that make it incredibly difficult for administrators to exercise authority on their campuses without ending up in court. A far better route, the one put forth by Justice Clarence Thomas in the recent Bong Hits 4 Jesus case, would be to allow individual school leaders to run their campuses as they see fit. Students should be entitled to a certain level of decorum, though, and allowed to learn without interruption.

Which is why the controversial stuff—passing out birth control; holding sexual education classes; founding clubs for homosexual students; wearing arm-bands that signify one is for/against war; wearing T-shirts that degrade another’s views, race, haircut, etc.—needs to be left outside k-12 public schools. Principals would be smart to take this stance. Otherwise, we’ll never see an end to the bickering and the judicial rulings.      

Bottom line, the courts are too entrenched in public schools and it’s a mess. Principals are right to wonder why their authority to maintain order is in this way stanched.