NEW YORK – A second lawsuit challenging New York state’s teacher tenure laws was filed this week by seven families who contend the teacher job protections keep bad teachers in the classroom and are dragging down student learning.     

Campbell Brown

“The families, including five from some of the most impoverished communities in the city, claim their children were underserved in school due to incompetent teachers who only kept their jobs because of tenure laws that violate kids’ constitutional right to a sound, basic education,” the New York Daily News reports.

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“I stand in awe of these parents and their commitment to demanding that the system change,” said former CNN news anchor Campbell Brown, who is helping to facilitate the lawsuit with her nonprofit Partnership For Educational Justice.

Brown has teamed with the law firm Kirkland & Ellis to help parents navigate the legal process. Kirkland & Ellis “is among the largest firms in the country and played a prominent role in defending California’s controversial parent trigger law, which allows parents to force major changes at failing schools if they are able to gather signatures from 51 percent of parents,” according to the news site.

Brown has said she will pursue similar lawsuits in other states where teacher job protections are holding students back. The premise of the lawsuit is that current teacher tenure and seniority laws make it very difficult to fire bad teachers, and forces schools to follow nonsensical last-in, first-out union rules during layoffs.

The New York lawsuit tells the stories of several students who have been screwed by the system, particularly in their formative academic years.

“The lawsuit details the frustration of Tauana Goins, who says a teacher at Public School 106 in Far Rockaway, Queens, called students ‘miserable’ and went so far as to call her 8-year-old daughter ‘a loser.’ The girl became so scared she regressed academically, her 27-year-old mother says,” according to the Daily News.

“Another kid named in the suit, King Doster, 6, said his teacher at P.S. 140 in Springfield Gardens, Queens, claimed she was ‘too busy’ to help him learn to read.”

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The lawsuit also includes two families from Rochester.

It’s also the second lawsuit challenging New York teacher tenure laws filed in recent weeks. The New York City Parents Union previously filed a lawsuit on behalf of parents with Staten Island Supreme Court, though it’s possible the two lawsuits could be combined in the future, the Daily News reports.

The legal challenges follow a ruling in June by a Los Angeles Superior Court judge that California’s teacher tenure laws violate students’ right to a quality education. That legal challenge was funded by Silicon Valley billionaire David Welch.

Welch is advising Brown in the New York lawsuit, according to the news site.

The New York City teachers union has declined comment on the litigation, but recently joined in the legal battle involving the New York City Parents union to defend the state’s teacher tenure laws.

Ironically, the teachers union helped to fund the parents union in 2011 and 2012, according to the Daily News.

The New York State United Teachers, however, issued a public rant about Brown’s lawsuit in an attempt to discredit the case and offer numerous excuses for why students are struggling with bad teachers.

“Before Campbell Brown’s cable TV show was canceled, its slogan was ‘No Bias, No Bull.’ Yet Campbell Brown is slinging both with abandon. She and her wealthy supporters seem to think that if teachers could be fired for any reason at any time, student achievement in high-poverty schools would miraculously soar. That ignores the enormous, well-documented challenges facing students and teachers in high-poverty communities,” the union complained.

“Pervasive, grinding poverty and chronic underfunding burden students in too many of our cities and poor rural communities. Homelessness, violent crime, overcrowded classrooms, students working to learn English and chronic budget shortfalls are among the outside influences — beyond the control of teachers — that unquestionably impact student achievement. It’s sensationalistic and unsupportable to say that tenure is the problem.”