Mercedes Schneider writes about the recent events in Minnesota, where Campbell Brown and her reform organization (Partnership for Educational Justice) filed a Vergara-style lawsuit against teacher tenure, claiming that tenure has some relation to low test scores and therefore violates the civil rights of students of color who get low test scores.
This same claim cost millions of dollars to litigate in California after a lower court judge ruled in favor of the plaintiffs in the Vergara case, but was then overturned in two appeals by higher courts. The billionaires behind corporate reform desperately wanted to have tenure declared a violation of civil rights, and they spent freely to promote that idea. The unions representing teachers wasted dues defending teachers’ right to due process.
But the outcome in Minnesota was different because the judge hearing the case couldn’t find a connection between tenure and test scores!
On October 26, 2016, the Minnesota teacher tenure lawsuit prodded by Campbell Brown’s Partnership for Educational Justice (PEJ) hit a roadblock when Ramsey County (MN) Judge Margaret Marrinan tossed out the PEJ-supported (instigated?) Forslund vs. Minnesota suit on the grounds that the suit “failed to establish a link between low academic achievement and the due process provided by the tenure laws,” as the Star Tribune reports.
There is something to be said for common sense.
Rumor hath it that Brown will file suit in other states. Here is hoping that she runs into more judges who are wise and know that she is peddling anti-teacher nonsense.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Can you imagine what kind of help to actual kids could have been achieved from the money used for these lawsuits?
Further proof that this has NOTHING to do with the kids.
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Amen
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Education “reform” is all about money and hopefully more judges and other people will realize it.
Campbell Brown has sold her soul to the devil. If someone accused her of a crime, would she demand a trial, or would she just accept being fired? If she were exonerated by the courts and still fired, would she accept that? Well, teachers wouldn’t either.
And of course this intelligent woman knows very well that standardized tests generally reflect the family background of the student. Shame on her.
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Good. Now she can get on her broom and fly to her next stop on the anti-union tour.
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Linda,
What gives you the impression Brown is intelligent?
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“Rumor hath it that Brown will file suit in other states. Here is hoping that she runs into more judges who are wise and know that she is peddling anti-teacher nonsense.”
Rumor?
Hell, Campbell and her org did just that, filing another of these hare-brained lawsuits in New Jersey two days after the one in Minnesota was tossed (earlier this week). My suspicion is that the loss in Minnesota hastened her filing in New Jersey, so as to keep the momentum going after — and to draw attention away from — the failure in Minnesota.
The initial anti-tenure ruling by Judge Treu in California may have been — or may yet prove to be — an outlier, judicially speaking. The California Appeals Court ruling was particularly damning in the particulars of its ruling against Campbell and the tenure-hunters, and by implication, against the reasoning of their fellow California jurist, Judge Treu. The California Supreme Court refused to even allow a hearing, citing the soundness and strength of the Appeals Court’s reasoning.
The same just happened in Minnesota. Near the end of his ruling, the Minnesota judge even added in another compelling argument: all of Minnesota’s lowest rated schools (based on test scores and other factors) are charter schools that had been in operation for two decades … two decades, mind you, where NONE OF THE TEACHERS HAD ANY KIND OF TENURE, AND THUS, COULD BE FIRED AT WILL. This astonishing fact, the judge argued, blew the plaintiff’s whole ‘no-tenure-leads-to-great-teaching-&-great schools’ claim.
Indeed, these two precedents in California and Minnesota will be given significant credibility and consideration in the courtrooms of other two states where Campbell’s idiotic lawsuits are still alive — New York, and now New Jersey — and in all future states where Campbell wants to waste more millions of dollars of her corporate donors’ money.
BOTTOM LINE: the courts ain’t the way to go on this one, guys.
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When I was a celebrated teacher in NYC http://www.opednews.com/author/author40790.html
this happened to me. I cost me 25 thousand dollars to keep my pension and benefits after 40 years of dedicated service where I earned that Tenure.
http://www.perdaily.com/2011/01/lausd-et-al-a-national-scandal-of-enormous-proportions-by-susan-lee-schwartz-part-1.html
If the union had stood up for me, this could not have occurred.
Across the nation, they looked the other way.
Seeing this success, empowered Campell and clones, and all those in favor of removing THE PROFESSIONAL TEACHER from the schools, so the EDUCATIONAL INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX https://greatschoolwars.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/eic-oct_11.pdf could replace real learning with the core curricula crap that no real teacher would ever use.
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