Imagine being admitted to the hospital with a serious illness. Imagine further that your condition worsens after receiving no treatment from doctors and nurses. Lastly, imagine being discharged from the hospital and enduring a lifetime of hardship stemming from the neglect you experienced.
This is the type of appalling treatment endured by children all over the country, including here in the St. Louis area. They attend school, but receive little education. When they graduate (if they graduate), they are left to deal with the effects of their woeful educational experiences.
But, unlike the hypothetical person in the hospital scenario, these students are essentially blocked from bringing malpractice claims against the entities (and people) responsible for their educational harms.
A recent Post-Dispatch article chronicled the experiences of a Normandy High honor student who is in the midst of a wasted school year. Normandy High has no honors courses, and the courses they do have often lack rigor. Many of the teachers are unqualified, some uncaring. The student transfer law has systematically bled resources from already-impoverished Normandy schools – and from most indications, things are now worse for the 3600 students who remain in the district (or collective, as its new state-run iteration is called).
Normandy, it seems, is in the midst of a death spiral. The state is failing to adhere to its constitutional obligation to promote a “general diffusion of knowledge and intelligence.” The district is failing to ensure that students are “college- and career-ready.” Inadequate education is tied to an array of life-sapping outcomes – a reality that many Normandy students will endure first-hand.
Education malpractice claims are universally rejected by courts for a host of so-called public policy reasons, most of which have nothing to do with the merits of the claim. One reason, however, merits some attention.
It posits that the collaborative and subjective nature of the educational process makes it impossible to identify the proximate cause of a student’s failure to learn. This may be true in many cases, maybe even most. But surely there are situations where proximate cause is clear. Normandy High is an example.
It is not difficult to grasp the effects that meager funding, unqualified teachers, limited course offerings and other inadequacies can have on the learning process. The proof is in the unfortunate outcomes: high dropout rates, failure to meet state standards, high turnover rates of teachers and staff, and overall failure to launch for many students.
This proof is made even more compelling when you consider the talent that remains in Normandy schools. Normandy may be a “failing” district, but its thousands of students are not failures. They represent a wealth of human potential, much of which is at risk of going untapped.
Judicial hostility to education malpractice claims disadvantages poor kids the most because these kids are most likely to have their learning and development stunted by awful schools. It is important to highlight that education malpractice claims are not necessarily about financial recoveries, but about giving victims access to the education they should have received in the first place. Recoveries could include compensatory education, such as district-funded college-level remedial courses for students who graduate and find themselves not college ready.
Malpractice claims are a powerful tool for holding professionals accountable to reasonable standards of care. Education administrators and teachers are professionals. Their actions and omissions are exceedingly consequential. There is no good reason for preventing victims of education malpractice from holding the state and school districts accountable for allowing schools to become education wastelands.
Aaron N. Taylor is a professor at Saint Louis University School of Law and director of the Law School Survey of Student Engagement.
