Parents' Teacher Tenure Challenge Heads Back to Court

New York state officials and teachers unions returned to court Tuesday to ask a judge to dismiss a case that challenges tenure in New York City schools.

They are arguing that changes made by the legislature this past spring to tenure and to the state's teacher evaluation system have met the demands of parents who brought the suit. But the two groups of parents say the changes haven't gone far enough.

The parents argue that tenure and other job protections violate students' rights to a sound, basic education under the state's constitution.

But Steven Banks, the state's assistant attorney general, says it now takes four years for a teacher to become eligible for tenure instead of three — something parents had asked for.

"We live in a different world today than we did when this action was filed," Banks said.

He also said the legislature, with help from Gov. Andrew Cuomo, changed the teacher evaluation system for the third time in five years by putting more weight on student test scores and independent observations of teachers. 

Judge Philip Minardo appeared to listen with skepticism. Referring to the legislature's changes, which took effect in April, he asked the defendants, "Did they really do something or are they just massaging this?"

He also questioned the impact of recent changes on seniority protections, called LIFO, or last-in, first-out. Banks said this system is no longer in place at the lowest-performing schools, where layoffs are now supposed to be based on teacher effectiveness ratings instead of seniority.

But Jay Lefkowitz, an attorney with the Partnership for Educational Justice, one of the parent groups that sued,  argued that because this change only applies to the lowest-performing schools, the other 95 percent are "business as usual." The Partnership is led by former TV anchor Campbell Brown. 

The other group of plaintiffs is represented by the New York City Parents Union.  Both groups also took issue with changes to the teacher evaluation system.

"When fundamentally, 90 percent of the teachers in the state of being given effective or highly effective ratings, and only 30 percent, 33 percent of the students are reading or doing math at grade level, that tells the whole story," Lefkowitz told the court.  He predicted little would change because the system is still too subjective.

Charles Moerdler, an attorney representing the city's United Federation of Teachers, accused the plaintiffs of being part of a national movement to blame teachers and weaken labor laws.  He pointed to recent news reports that fewer people are entering the teaching profession.

But Mona Davids, president of the Parents Union, dismissed that argument. "If they want to say we're on a witch hunt, that's what we're hunting," she said. "We want those teachers, those ineffective teachers out of the classrooms, because they are destroying countless lives. They are destroying countless futures. And it needs to stop."