Two lawsuits filed in October 2016 opened the InformED Report for November 14, 2016. In New Jersey, civil rights groups challenged the state’s plan to make passing the PARCC exams a condition of graduation. In Utah, LGBT advocates went to court over laws that limit what teachers may say about homosexuality. The edition then looked at closer scrutiny of charter schools, and closed with two stories about teachers: housing in Los Angeles that none of them lived in, and federal figures on chronic teacher absence.
In this edition
- Civil rights and parent groups sued New Jersey over graduation rules that require passing the PARCC exams.
- Equality Utah and the National Center for Lesbian Rights sued over Utah laws barring “advocacy of homosexuality” in class.
- Pennsylvania, the NAACP and L.A. Unified all moved toward tighter oversight of charter schools.
- Not one L.A. Unified teacher lived in the affordable apartments the district built to keep teachers.
- Federal data estimated that 27 percent of U.S. teachers missed more than 10 days of school a year.
New Jersey sued over PARCC as a graduation requirement
NJ.com’s Adam Clark reported that the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey and the Education Law Center filed suit on October 21 on behalf of the Latino Action Network, the Latino Coalition of New Jersey and the Paterson Education Fund. Their target was the state’s new graduation requirements, which apply to students who were freshmen in fall 2016 and every class after them, and which include passing the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers exams, known as PARCC. The groups argued that the rules break state law and fall hardest on low-income and minority students.
Ed Barocas, legal director of the ACLU of New Jersey, said the state knew about the test’s “high failure rates, extreme racial disparities, and deep economic divisions in passing scores” and chose to use it anyway. The state Department of Education declined to respond. For high school leaders, the case raised a planning question that would not wait for a ruling: how to identify early the students least likely to pass, and what alternative routes to a diploma would remain open to them if the rules stood.
LGBT advocates challenge Utah’s classroom laws
In The Washington Times, Lindsay Whitehurst reported on a lawsuit filed on October 24 by Equality Utah and the National Center for Lesbian Rights. The suit targets a 2001 state law, passed as part of a broad sex education bill, that bars instruction on the “advocacy of homosexuality,” along with contraceptives and sex outside marriage. According to the suit, the law kept teachers from helping a 7-year-old boy who was bullied for wearing girls’ clothes, because they could not tell him it was all right to be gay.
Christopher Stoll, a lawyer with the center, said similar rules exist elsewhere and that the group might bring suits in Arizona, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina and Texas. Such laws, he said, “send the message that their identity is something that’s too shameful to even be discussed in class.” Whatever the court decided, the case showed a practical tension for principals: anti-bullying policies ask staff to step in, while curriculum rules can leave teachers unsure what they are allowed to say when they do.
Charter schools under closer scrutiny
In the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Molly Born described proposals from Pennsylvania state Sen. Jim Brewster, a Democrat from McKeesport, aimed at “transparency, fiscal solvency and accountability issues” in charter schools. They were not expected in bill form until 2017, the 20th anniversary of the state’s charter law. Pennsylvania had more than 150 brick-and-mortar charters, nearly half of them in Philadelphia, enrolling 128,000 students, plus 14 cyber charters, and none had an elected school board.
Nationally, Steven Rosenfeld reported for AlterNet that the NAACP’s 63-member board had ratified a resolution, first passed at its summer convention, calling for a moratorium on charter expansion and stronger oversight. Board chair Roslyn M. Brock said charters should receive “the same level of oversight” and provide the same transparency as traditional public schools. In Los Angeles, Howard Blume of the Los Angeles Times reported that the Board of Education had voted to close three charters, officially because their parent organization was slow to provide requested paperwork. Blume noted the built-in tension: L.A. Unified authorizes charters and decides every five years whether to renew them, while competing with them for students and the funding that follows.
For district leaders, the common thread was accountability. Whether the push came from a legislature, a civil rights group or an authorizing district, the questions were the ones asked of traditional schools: who governs, how public money is reported, and when a school may be closed.
Teacher housing that teachers could not use
A second Los Angeles Times story looked at an experiment in keeping teachers. In the mid-2000s, rising rents were driving turnover, and in some neighborhoods nearly half of new teachers left the district within three years. L.A. Unified built two below-market apartment complexes on unused district land in Gardena and Hollywood, with a third under construction. The 156 units were fully occupied, but not by teachers. Teachers earned too much to qualify. Of the units, 121 were rented by district service workers such as cafeteria workers, bus drivers and special education assistants, the lowest-paid group in the system.
The project had still helped the district’s lowest-paid staff. For districts considering staff housing, the lesson was in the design: income limits attached to affordable-housing funding decide who can move in, and they need to match the employees the project is meant to keep.
More than one in four teachers chronically absent
The Washington Post reported that the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights estimated that 27 percent of the nation’s full-time teachers missed more than 10 days of regular classes in a school year. In some systems, especially poor rural districts and some large cities, the rate rose above 75 percent in 2014, the most recent year available. Cleveland reported about 84 percent of its 2,700 teachers, and Nevada’s Clark County more than half of its 17,000.
The figures were self-reported by districts, which may not record absences the same way, so comparisons between systems need care. Even so, the scale mattered for anyone who staffs schools. Every absence has to be covered by a substitute or by colleagues, and the students in those classrooms lose continuity whatever the reason for the absence.
Sources
- Adam Clark, “Civil rights groups sue N.J. over graduation requirements,” NJ.com, October 2016.
- Lindsay Whitehurst, “LGBT group sues Utah over anti-gay school laws,” The Washington Times, October 24, 2016.
- Molly Born, “Charter schools face state action in 2017,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, October 24, 2016.
- Steven Rosenfeld, “NAACP calls for moratorium on charter schools until they stop acting like private schools,” AlterNet, via Salon, October 22, 2016.
- Howard Blume, “L.A. Unified takes a harder look at its charter schools. Critics blame politics,” Los Angeles Times, October 2016.
- “LAUSD teachers earn too much to live in the affordable housing apartments built for them,” Los Angeles Times, October 2016.
- “1 in 4 U.S. teachers are chronically absent, missing more than 10 days of school,” The Washington Post, October 26, 2016.
About the InformED Report
The InformED Report is edCircuit’s short news program on education. This edition first ran on November 14, 2016. In 2026, edCircuit re-presented it with a new anchor and this full written account. Both report the stories as they stood on that date and link the original reporting, so readers can see exactly where each claim came from.
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