- Fired D.C. Educators Dig In Against DCPS
- 7 Ways Games May Save Our Schools
- Stay Informed
Fired D.C. Educators Dig In Against DCPS
The Washington Informer
By Khalid Naji-Allah
November 9, 2011
In his 36 years as a lawyer, John F. "Johnny" Mercer said he has never seen a case play out the way his case representing almost 50 principals and teachers has.
Mercer, a well-known D.C.-based attorney, said Assistant School Principal Kenny Dickerson approached him in May 2008, asking his help to fight against District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) which had terminated him. Mercer filed a defamation lawsuit on behalf of his client. They number among the more than 250 educators dismissed by DCPS Chancellors Michelle Rhee and Kaya Henderson over the past three years.
"It's not about education. It's about the arbitrary dismantling of people's lives powered by institutional scapegoating, it's about abuse, using children as experimental fodder and once again bringing out that good, old American bigotry, stereotyping and money-grubbing," Mercer said. "A few principals have used their retreat rights and have gone back to work at the last teaching positions they had, and they have been retaliated against by DCPS which terminated them in a reduction in force (RIF). They were put in a feudal system and driven out. This is one of the most interesting things I've ever seen. I've never seen a case where they were so harsh. They wanted to get rid of these teachers and principals in any way, shape, or form."
What DCPS officials characterized as a RIF was actually a mass firing amounting to wrongful termination, Mercer and his clients say. They contend that Rhee's stated reason for dismissing them – budgetary reasons – is a red herring. To add insult to injury, according to Mercer, many of the principals received satisfactory or better evaluations and many of them did not receive mid-year or end-of-year evaluations as stipulated by the collective bargaining agreement.
The slurs and negative characterizations, being denied due process, and the unjust nature of their dismissals are what led the principals and teachers to file suit. They say they are the victims of sex, race and age discrimination and intend to prove it in court.
"(DCPS has) made the principals undesirables. It's a horrible thing," he said. "I don't know which is worst. They can terminate people for a reason or none at all. Imagine, they throw you out of a job and you can't fight it. You're seen as idiotic and incompetent people. When I talked to them the first time, I was almost in tears. They worked hard day and night. (DCPS) picked Blacks and Latinos over age 40 and kicked them to the curb. Some of them were doing very well."
Mercer was so incensed by what he heard that he decided not to take money on the case unless and until they win.
Mercer, founder and managing partner at Mercer Law Associates in Northwest, echoed the sentiment of Washington Teachers' Union President Nathan Saunders, who has been engaged in longstanding skirmishes with DCPS over tenure, evaluations, and unfair dismissals, among other issues.
"There is institutional prejudice, bias and discrimination, for example, in employment evaluation practices which are about as scientifically valid as equating Negroes' brains with intelligence," said Saunders in a recent interview. "We're dealing with a school system steeped in Anglo-Saxon theory. The system has to accept the responsibility that it is creating a situation that is problematic."
Saunders said those who have been terminated by Rhee and her successor Henderson, are most often experienced, knowledgeable Black women, and they are replaced by young, inexperienced teachers.
"Teachers with one year of experience and no certification are sent to high-needs areas," he said. "You certainly can't say it's an accident. It's very noticeable. When you look at the termination patterns, you see most of the firings in Southeast, not upper Northwest. That means increased disruption and turnover (in high-needs areas). A teacher with one year's experience is about as confused about the subject matter as my kids."
Mercer said he agrees 100 percent with the oft-stated premise that non-white educators are being separated from D.C. schools because the complexion of the city has changed. White parents who have moved back into the District no longer want to pay the steep fees they incur to send their children to private schools. They want viable and functioning schools in the places where they live, with teachers who look like them and DCPS is accommodating that demand.
"DCPS has taken extraordinary measures to get these people out," said Mercer. "Rhee's folks, that is the lawyers involved, developed a strategy to make this happen but gave it the appearance of being within the framework of the law, gave it the credibility of the law. This way, who cares? You throw out who you want.
"It is a wonderful way to allow something as detestable as this to occur. They can stand on this theory ... It really is a racist thing. A lot of people don't want to face it but it's true. People need to understand that we are capable of doing magnificent things with very little. Every high school has children graduating and going to college."
The educators in their filing allege that Rhee adopted or actually initiated, the repeated discriminatory practice curtailing the plaintiffs' contract rights. School officials, however, assert that "the plaintiffs ... failed to pursue their exclusive remedies provided under the Comprehensive Merit Personnel Act," which says that "the District of Columbia government shall have a modern flexible system of public personnel administration, which shall ... [e] stablish impartial and comprehensive administrative or negotiated procedures for resolving employee grievances."
Some of the educators filed grievances with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and officials there, after investigating the claims, advised them to sue, said Mercer.
Suji Sutler, a lawyer who is working with Mercer on the case, said Federal Court Judge Richard W. Roberts ruled on behalf of the plaintiffs by refusing the District's motion to dismiss the case and last week, accepted the plaintiffs' third amended complaint. The ruling against DCPS's motion comes more than a year after it was filed.
Sutler said the plan is to ask the judge to grant the plaintiffs' request for certification as a class-action suit. If granted, it is likely that other DCPS employees will then join, she added.
Both Mercer and Sutler expect the District of Columbia to file another Motion to Dismiss, to which the plaintiffs will respond. A school spokesman told the Washington Informer, DCPS customarily does not comment on cases that are making their way through the legal process.
Almost unnoticed in all the legal maneuvering, Sutler said, is the effect of these actions against the teachers and principals. One principal has died, the families of principals and teachers have borne the anxiety and angst of being unemployed, and schools in the region are reluctant to hire them because of the negative connotations affixed to them.
"The damage is already done. There has been psychological, emotional and financial damage. They have already violated these people's due process," she said. "People are out looking for work, they've been defamed. It's been very painful for these principals and teachers. A lot of damage has been done and there really has been no discussion on the negative impact on students, schools, neighborhoods and communities.
"They fire more than 200 teachers at one time and I don't think there has been much conversation about the impact. Every adult had a relationship with many students outside of the classroom in each school. In addition to instruction, they provided breakfast, mental health and spiritual support, and had relationships with moms and dads. It was very damaging to individual lives. There has to be truth and reconciliation about what's happened."
7 Ways Games May Save Our Schools
The Washington Post
By Jay Mathews
November 9, 2011
I have never played video games. They cut into reading time. Today, I don’t even understand TV advertisements for games. Do you have to get inside an Xbox? What?
I am sensing this may become a handicap for an education writer. What game designers know about what excites and involves their users may be the key to a new age of online learning.
I say maybe because I have grown weary of technological breakthrough reports that promise more for classrooms than they deliver. Twenty-first century learning plans, when you examine them closely, often appear to be little more than curriculums from the previous century with more expensive equipment and better-written mission statements.
That’s what I thought until I bumped into Tom Vander Ark’s new book, “Getting Smart: How Digital Learning Is Changing the World,” particularly the chapter on motivation. He lists seven ways video games reward the brain, as revealed in a 2010 speech by editor and game theorist Tom Chatfield. Even I could see that it was also a list of seven things many great teachers use:
1. Continuous grading. Vander Ark notes that “most games give participants the ability to watch their progress slowly but surely creep along in infinitesimal increments . . . like a bar graph, or a figure in a race, but somehow how the gamer is doing overall is clearly displayed and communicated.”
2. Multiple long- and short-term aims that are clearly defined. There are multiple levels and multiple forms of success.
3. Rewarding effort. You get credit every time you do something.
4. Feedback. “Gamers can fail in millions of small ways, learn quickly what they need to change and then move on,” Vander Ark says .
5. Element of uncertainty. Experiences that surprise just enough can create high engagement. The gamer, like me reading a detective novel, wants to know what happens next and see if he identified the perp.
6. Finding windows of learning. Games give players some important elements they need to remember.
7. Confidence. Chatfield concluded that game reward systems make people braver, more willing to take risks and harder to discourage. I will have to take his word for it, but those are qualities good teachers impart to their students.
Motivation is the key to good schools. It is at the heart of our many arguments over education policy. Can the desire to learn be stimulated by tests that affect graduation, or lessons that fit the subject to the students’ personal experiences, or a yearning to please a caring teacher, or a team spirit that wants our class spelling average to beat that of the third grade across the hall?
For game designers, Vander Ark points out, motivation means sales. They can see quickly what works and what doesn’t.
I have seen good teachers do continuous grading by calling on everyone in class each day and starting each day off with a short quiz. They reward effort with a smile, a cheer from the class, a better grade or a chance to read a better book. They introduce uncertainty by asking a question that does not have an obvious answer and with a series of questions to the class (Socrates would have been an awesome game designer) to find the most likely answer.
Fairfax County’s Bernie Glaze, one of the best social studies teachers I ever saw, once explained to me the useful connection between games and learning. Two of her students were resisting her lesson on philosophers. They called them old white guys without a jump shot. She engaged the two by saying that all she wanted from them was some thoughtful analysis, just as they discussed each morning why their basketball heroes had won or lost the night before.
It will be hard to produce online lessons that make this happen in physics, calculus, Romantic poetry and civics. But smart people say there is a way to do it. That’s fine as long as they check the result with teachers.
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