United States v. Nansemond County School Board

351 F. Supp. 196, 5 Fair Empl. Prac. Cas. (BNA) 656
CourtDistrict Court, E.D. Virginia
DecidedNovember 28, 1972
DocketCiv. A. 392-70-N and 472-71-N
StatusPublished
Cited by4 cases

This text of 351 F. Supp. 196 (United States v. Nansemond County School Board) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering District Court, E.D. Virginia primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
United States v. Nansemond County School Board, 351 F. Supp. 196, 5 Fair Empl. Prac. Cas. (BNA) 656 (E.D. Va. 1972).

Opinion

MEMORANDUM

WALTER E. HOFFMAN, Chief Judge.

The findings and conclusions herein pertain to both Civil Action No. 392-70-N and Civil Action No. 472-71-N, which were consolidated on December 8, 1971, for discovery and trial. The United States is seeking supplemental relief in its original school desegregation suit against the Nansemond County School Board, which was initiated pursuant to the provisions of 42 U.S.C. § 2000c-6, and 28 U.S.C. § 1345. The government asks the court to order the defendant school board to demonstrate that its hiring, firing, demotion, promotion, dismissal, and payment of its staff and faculty have been accomplished through reasonable objective standards. Additionally, the school operation plan for the 1971-72 school year was opposed, but that plan was approved on October. 18, 1971, as effectively creating a unitary system in strict compliance with the law. The individual plaintiffs herein seek to invalidate the objective criteria used by the school board as being irrelevant and not uniformly applied, and thereby in violation of the due process and equal pro *200 tection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. Their action is brought pursuant to 28 U.S.C. §§ 1331, 1343, and 42 U.S.C. §§ 1981, 1983.

This case is interesting and deserves close attention in that it clearly defines the paradox which is currently facing the school boards and the district courts throughout our nation. On the one hand, the school board is admonished for using subjective standards in evaluating its teachers and is told that only objective standards are acceptable. Conversely, once the school board adopts a criteria .which could hardly be more objective, protests are lodged because employment decisions are made without reference to some purely subjective standards. If we were required to invalidate both guidelines, the school board would find itself forced to adopt a quota system, disregarding the qualifications of the teachers involved. Such a result is the antithesis of the philosophy underlying much civil rights litigation-.

Early in 1968, Robert A. Wood became the new Superintendent of the Nansemond County School System and, from the outset, he began to evaluate the system looking for the areas in' which improvement was needed. As a part of this undertaking, an independent biracial evaluation committee of educational experts was appointed to survey the entire system and make a report of its findings. The committee submitted its findings (the Stahl report) in the spring of 1969 and, among other comments, reported that, while the teachers apparently knew their subject matter, they either lacked the ability to communicate and/or were drastically outdated in their teaching techniques.

The sense of urgency conveyed by the Stahl report reinforced Wood’s concern over the faculty. Indeed, since taking over as school superintendent, he had initiated a uniform system-wide teacher evaluation form in an effort to have some common understanding by the principals as to what a particular rating connoted. However, such a form requires years to be adequately developed and a principal needs more than one years’ experience as an evaluator to become completely reliable. There was evidence from the plaintiff’s expert that the new criteria were, in fact, vague. Also, Nansemond County’s supervisory staff was overworked to such an extent that they could not bear the necessary burden of close effective supervision.

For these reasons, other objective criteria were sought and eventually a test score of 500 on the Weighted Commons section of the National Teachers Exam (NTE) was adopted as a minimum requirement. This decision was not hastily made, as it was not approved until January 13, 1970. Before adopting the NTE requirement, other school systems which used the same test were contacted. They included the surrounding systems of Norfolk, Portsmouth, Virginia Beach, Chesapeake and Newport News, plus North Carolina which has a similar policy with regard to state-wide certification. There were some observations by school officials that many of the teachers whose work was unsatisfactory came from North Carolina, having failed" to earn a teaching certificate in that state. A majority of these teachers were white. The Educational Testing Service (ETS) of Princeton, New Jersey, the originator of the NTE, was requésted to send all information it had concerning the test. The decision to use the test was also made in light of additional studies reported in psychology journals, the fact that some of the area’s colleges had open admission requirements, and also that there was no longer a dearth of qualified applicants but rather a surplus from which to choose. "

From the information supplied to him. by ETS, which was substantiated by the plaintiff’s expert witness, James R. Deneen, Wood obtained evidence as to the nature and scope of the NTE. It is a test given several times each year by the ETS which is solely responsible for administering and grading the test and reporting the results. It has two sections; the Weighted Commons and the Teach *201 ing Area Examination. The latter is a test of an individual’s command of a specific subject such as math, history, French, etc. The Weighted Commons section offers a general appraisal of a prospective teacher’s basic professional preparation and general academic attainment. Since it is standardized nationally, it offers an opportunity for school boards to better interpret transcripts from colleges of varying qualities. The NTE is designed to test important aspects of professional studies — psychological foundations of education, societal foundations of education, teaching principles and practices — and it is updated every year to test the most current teaching philosophies and techniques.

While ETS does not recommend using NTE scores as a sole criteria, it readily admits that most school districts establish a local minimum, which must be met initially or within a specified period of time. Nansemond County adopted as a minimum requirement the submission of a score of 500 on the NTE, which would rank the applicant somewhere within the bottom 10 to 15 percentile. The school board did not require all the teachers in the system to take the NTE, but only teachers who were new to the county in 1970-71 and all subsequent applicants. Some teachers took the NTE more than once during the year in question. Those hired for 1970-71 were informed that the renewal of their contracts was conditioned on their receiving a score of at least 500 on the Weighted Commons. This provision was clearly set out in the teachers’ contracts at the time of signing.

After adopting the NTE requirement, Nansemond County employed Dr. Roger L. Long to undertake a study of the test scores and the proper use thereof. Dr. Long has a Doctor of Education degree with heavy emphasis on testing and a high degree of familiarity with the NTE itself. It is because the school board implemented its decision before Dr. Long completed his empirical study that the plaintiffs object.

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Bluebook (online)
351 F. Supp. 196, 5 Fair Empl. Prac. Cas. (BNA) 656, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/united-states-v-nansemond-county-school-board-vaed-1972.