A county judge in Indiana has ruled that the autocratic State Superintendent of Education Tony Bennett could not impose a standard contract on every district in the state that would have violated all existing contracts.
From the story:
“A county judge has ruled that a state-pushed standard teacher contract form that would have allowed Indiana school districts to change or increase their hours without paying them more is illegal.
Marion County Judge Patrick McCarty permanently barred the Indiana Department of Education and state Superintendent Tony Bennett from using the standard forms, which all school districts would have been required to use. He said the department doesn’t have any legal authority to unilaterally contradict existing contract law.
“The regular teacher’s contract form drafted by Dr. Bennett is unconscionable in that it gives school corporations the authority to unilaterally modify the number of days and hours that a teacher must work, but it does not require the school corporation to pay for the additional labor or any other additional consideration,” McCarty wrote in the nine-page ruling issued Sept. 11.”
It is nice to remember from time to time that we live in a nation of laws, not men.
I’m sure it will be appealed to a court run by a corporation and overturned. After all, Citizens United has defined corporations as people too.
Now to deal with the rest of the things he has dealt us Hoosier teachers!
Schoolteachers are not normally litigous people, but once they start taking these crazy “reforms” to court, I think they will see positive results.
It is nice to remember from time to time that we live in a nation of laws, not men.
Speaking of the rule of law:
Knowledge and learning, general diffused throughout a community, being essential to the preservation of a free government; it should be the duty of the General Assembly to encourage, by all suitable means, moral, intellectual scientific, and agricultural improvement; and provide, by law, for a general and uniform system of Common Schools, wherein tuition shall without charge, and equally open to all.
UTLA has appealed a ruling that their contract provisions violate California’s constitution. In general, reading the briefs is a prerequisite to rendering a decision in “a nation of laws, not men.”
Almost all states have similar wording in their respective constitutions stating similar sentiments. We need to start using them as a basis for counteracting the educational deforms.
Kudos to McCarty for doing his job, but I wonder if anyone else is bothered by the term “school corporations.”