As you know, I am not a big fan of turning to the courts to resolve the issue of teacher abuse. The Illinois Appellate decision I received today reinforced my misgivings. Basically, the courts view abused teachers today as the Southern courts viewed African Americans after the Civil War. They try our cases in a vacuum, assuming that the administrators did not set us up to fail, that they did not create blatantly false charges against us, and that administrators do not have the power to manipulate teachers into falsely testify against us so they could dispose of us via the courts. And what's worse, they take the word of these criminals running our schools and develop contempt for us as the troublemakers by the mere fact that we are fighting in court and giving them a hard time, contempt that guides their thinking.
I will be writing more about my legal trials and tribulations in the book I am in the process of completing. But in a nutshell, the court ignored most of the law I argued and regurgitated the "facts" to bury me. I argued that they could not rely on the "facts" because they were not true, and they responded that they were true because the soldiers that the district got to testify agreed with the administration. (Three teachers complained about me to the Board, but their complaints centered on the disruption my lawsuit was making yet I was not permitted testimony about the conflict or the retaliation so these complaints were construed as me making unacceptable trouble rather than legally protected trouble. All of us work(ed) in buildings with signs from the federal government saying we have a right to file a lawsuit and cannot be retaliated against; what wasn't in fine print was that no one will try to figure out if you were retaliated against. Although NAPTA members wonder why so many teachers just go along to get along, it is because most people do not trust this system, and rightfully so. As it is, there is no protection for teachers and they had better do what they are told or know they will suffer. I can vouch for this.
This court totally ignored the testimony of colleagues and others who agreed with me saying I was a great coworker, including testimony and a rebuttal written to the Board about how my team mate was also abused by this principal and both of us were treated unfairly, and accepted the "facts" on face value and used them to take the position they did not need to decide the law since I had cause to be fired based on these "facts", and that is that. (Sorry for using quotations around the word fact, but I don't know how else to describe lies that become legal truths.) They ignored my plea that is was unfair to deny me an affirmative defense so that I could show what these people did to me and how they fabricated the case considering that the hearing officer's decision stated that I did not provide any proof of retaliation after he barred me from showing proof. I argued that this decision reads as though I had no proof of retaliation rather than retaliation was not considered. It was sanitized from the hearing as if wonderful administrators had a problem with a teacher and did what they had to do, which could not have been further from the truth.
They saw no problem with the hearing officer's statement that he didn't care if they were picking on me or that he would hear nothing about the administrators and followed that same line of thinking by ignoring it and simply deciding that I caused trouble so I am out, period. As I mentioned, retaliation was not considered by the hearing officer, but he stated it was proven as not having happened and this false statement was not considered by the appellate court. So the case reads as though I was not retaliated against, which is even worse in terms of the impact it can have on future teachers since at least if it read that it didn't matter if I were retaliated against, I would have proof that our system does not care and other teachers would tread carefully rather than believe the law protects them. I will work diligently to develop that point in my next appeal if I am allowed one. Since it is their option rather than a right for me to appeal, I have grave doubts it will happen. But I will try to show just how this system works by continuing on this road of rejection, hoping that this record will disturb someone with power who cares about our country.
I asked them to take judicial notice of NAPTA's website as well as the Blase book so they could open their minds to reality, but they ignored that too. What they cleverly did was decide they did not need to decide about my First Amendment deprivations because I had other issues over which I deserved to be fired besides my speech so it did not matter that no one ever examined my speech. But all my issues, including the other issues, rested on the conflict over my speech and lawsuit about which I never was allowed to prove by using testimony to back the truth. My case was tried in a vacuum, which the higher court is carving into a dark hole to bury justice for teachers and all those affected by them - our entire nation.
By not caring about how it came about that I had a tape of a student meeting that I made and kept to use in court to show they were harassing me, they found me guilty of insubordination for keeping the tape. They stated that if I were afraid of something happening to it, I should have asked the court for protection. First of all, we all know that before the court ruled, it would have been destroyed. Secondly, look at the cost imposed upon me to protect my rights. Thirdly, based on how the court approaches this whole procedure with prejudice, we know they would have determined there was no need for protection since these fine people running our schools would never do anything wrong.
In essence, I made choices that triggered a hearing so I could finally put the issues in front of a power that cared about justice and the law, and was found guilty for triggering the decision. My thoughts were that this district will continue to harass and abuse me and order me to do things that are discriminatory and personally harmful and unjust in retaliation for my trying to expose them and that the these orders were unreasonable, evolving from the lawsuit as they were retaliating, and thus the court would protect me. I was wrong. The court not only decided that I had no right to keep that tape, but they ignored the law regarding changing a grade as well as who has a right to order me to undergo psychological testing. It was written as if School Code does not exist for these people and that I had no right to follow the laws; I was to follow the orders of these predators even though I was being harangued and destroyed with orders.
The way this process works is that whatever you do, you are wrong because they do not want teachers to have a voice in our country. The story of Bennett Packman, on our site, describes this principle vividly, since he was abused for refusing to follow an unreasonable order to take a sham course, and once Packman managed to expose the bogus course, which resulted in the district person running it going to jail, the district fired dozens of teachers for having taken the course. So the truth is that if you want to teach, know that those running the districts have absolute power to control you, including forcing you to harm yourself or lose your job.
I will never know if someone helped shape this court's prejudice since my winning would have made fools of so many public officials in this state that it could not happen politically, or if these people, on their own, simply bought into the prejudice that the lower court helped to develop using an overbearing, murky record. Throughout, this has been a case about me being a troublemaker and nothing more, since my voice has not been heard.
My belief is that the court is not the way we are going to expose teacher abuse. All we can do via the court is expose that the courts have no justice to offer abused teachers. I have taken my case through the courts to expose this, more than to win my case. This latest decision did not fail my agenda to show how unfair the courts are. Our situation is twisted with politics and it is easy for judges to rule on "facts" not law when the "facts" are outright lies put together by people in power with deep pockets. That is our problem.
So what does this suggest? We have to be proactive by uniting our voices and creating political pressure and think hard before wracking our brains and losing our finances trying to prevail in court. Most courts do not understand. It has been a rare teacher who has been heard. They operate from a paradigm that says that our schools are legitimate institutions that have the best interest of children in mind and thus anyone who gets in their way needs to be disposed of so they can continue to operate as they do. The prejudice was thick in my decision. For instance, they quoted me when I said that I was different than other teachers because I did not have to work for a living as meaning I was better - arrogant. Instead, if they had read the whole piece, and if they had the capability of understanding my position, they would have understood that I was different because I was freer to speak out. It didn't make me better. It made me able to speak. They took this and ran with it as if I were an evil human being; they operate with the belief that our schools are legitimate institutions designed to serve society and thus my position could be nothing more than arrogant as I could have no purpose in speaking out against them. They showed their contempt for me having called some of my colleagues quislings and Stepford teachers in a memo to the Board, either because they do not know this is true, or because they want to make sure no one knows this is true. I was remediated for that language and stopped using it in spite of its truth, but even that did not matter since when someone evil with power wants to get you, they can get you. It is as simple as that. And furthermore, keep in mind that this language is being used against me with no opportunity to present witnesses to corroborate the truth and no examination of my speech. How much more un-American can it get? Oh, I guess they could have sent me to Guantanamo.
The bottom line is that until we compile a force with which the good people in power can get the big picture, these decisions will evolve from prejudice, not the truth and our incidents at our respective schools will look like we were the problem, when it was far from the truth. This is the danger of using the courts, but given no real other option for justice, it is a dangerous path that most teachers pursue. Nevertheless, we would be fools to pursue it without an alternative political path, which is the goal of NAPTA - to create a voice that carves through all this obstructed justice.
Once again, a district has succeeded at using their power to silence a teacher and the only difference between this case and most of the cases out there is their ploy has worked in a higher court seldom reached due to the expense. But there are higher courts and as I have always said, I will do my best to succeed at making a record that will prove that no court will consider teacher abuse, my goal being the shaming of our country via the court of public opinion. After all, with so many people having reported that teacher abuse is occurring at their schools, as well as two acclaimed Education professors having researched and documented that teacher abuse is a plague on our schools, yet courts refuse to factor this in and sanction hearings devoid of any ability to prove retaliation in spite of a recent unanimous Supreme Court decision, Burlington Northern & Santa Fe Railway Company v. White that guarantees that employees are protected from retaliation, something is dangerously wrong with our justice system.
SOMETHING IS DANGEROUSLY WRONG WITH OUR JUSTICE SYSTEM AS IT APPLIES TO EDUCATION.
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