The story is “Court rules against ex-teacher with a phobia of young kids,” by Lisa Cornwell of the Associated Press. The link is http://news.yahoo.com/court-rules-against-ex-teacher-phobia-young-kids-190545334.html. Cornwell tells the tale of a retired teacher who sued a school district when she was forced to transfer to a middle school, claiming administrators had discriminated against her because she has a phobia that makes her fear young children. This woman lost her appeal in the federal courts and I suspect that decision will be for the best. The courts in this country would have been inundated with suits if teacher Maria Waltherr-Willard had won.

Still, I feel sorry for Maria Waltherr-Willard. Age and disability discrimination may be involved as Waltherr-Willard claimed. The 63-year-old French and Spanish teacher had taught at Mariemont High School in Cincinnati for over thirty years, until she was transferred by her district to a middle school in 2009. Her lawsuit alleged that the middle-school students triggered the phobia, forcing her retirement in 2011 as her mental health began to suffer and her blood pressure shot skyward.

According to the school district, Waltherr-Willard was the victim of circumstance. The school was shifting to an online French program during a period when the middle school lacked a Spanish teacher. School boards have always had the right to reassign teachers within their districts. I get to decide if I wish to teach in my district. The district decides where they need me.

Simply put, the Court declared that no contract existed which obliged the district to keep Ms. Waltherr-Willard at the high school. Waltherr-Willard must be a woman of her convictions to have pursued the case this far. I wonder that she believed she could ever have won this case and I hope that her attorney was not providing unsound advice solely to keep a paying client.

We hear often in the news about the need to get rid of unsatisfactory teachers. That alleged need has provided support for numbers-based rubrics as instruments for measuring teacher performance. Can we measure teachers? Only at the margins, I suspect, but that has not stopped data-driven government agencies from demanding that administrations attempt this feat. That has not stopped data-driven administrations from creating numbers to flesh out the rubrics, social science numbers that can be highly subjective, like the numbers I now associate with the Danielson Rubric.

I assure readers that districts can manage to get rid of teachers they don’t like, and they don’t need to make-up numbers and then use these fuzzy numbers to create weighted averages as axes. I have known teachers to be pushed into retirement. A couple of years ago, a high school counselor was moved to our middle school. Administration placed her in an isolated classroom in the basement at first, in one of the odd-smelling rooms that no one ever occupies. Those rooms are empty this year, as they have been during my years within this district, despite the fact that we are beginning to double up classrooms. That room had no intercom or phone, no way to contact security in an emergency other than sending a student up the stairs. Mid-year, they changed that counselor/teacher’s assignment and the subject she taught, bringing her up into the light at least. She was a counselor, not a classroom teacher, and the kids were running roughshod over her for the whole year — her last year. I would pass by the second classroom and look at the papers, broken pencils, and textbooks that had been tossed on the floor.

Districts have ways to get rid of teachers they don’t like. Reading between the lines, I’m pretty sure that that’s what happened to Maria, who must have loved her job not to go gently into retirement. Was she expensive, perhaps much more expensive than an alternative on-line program? Was she old-fashioned? Did she make the mistake of teaching grammar and spelling? Was she guilty of whole-group instruction? Did she fail students who did no work? Whatever her transgressions, I am guessing she aggravated someone on top unless she simply became much more costly than a technological alternative.

I also understand why her new position had to the potential to drive Maria toward doctors and federal courts. High-school French draws motivated students. Especially at upper levels, these students tend to be college-bound and academically-oriented. By contrast, there’s a good chance that Maria’s middle-school students were forced to take Spanish whether they liked it or not. Middle school students often have little or no say in their “electives.” Add to that the volatility and immaturity of young adolescents and I’m sure those middle-school classes proved a wild ride for Maria.

Eduhonesty: Hiring/firing, employing/riffing — the point I want to make here is that I don’t believe we need to create fuzzy numbers to manage the educational labor force. The idea that districts must helplessly sit by while tenured teachers fail to fulfill their responsibilities sounds attractive, but I have watched districts force multiple teachers out. I can say with certainty that districts are hardly powerless. In Illinois and other states, governments are busy fixing educational systems that were never shown to be broken, despite occasional anecdotal reports of individuals who were not doing their jobs.