CommentsFIRST PERSON-Since finishing my three-day teacher credential revocation hearing before the Office of Administrative Hearings (OAH) and Judge Aileen Cohn on Wednesday, February 14, I have been gratified to receive numerous calls and emails from all over the country asking how my hearing went.
The fact that I am unable to answer this question presently or in the foreseeable future speaks volumes about a completely compromised legal procedure that is, by its very nature, designed not to bring justice in a timely manner. Rather, it protracts things to the point where one gives up, like most unjustly targeted teachers do when faced with this never-ending, prohibitively expensive process.
I say “never-ending” because, once Judge Cohn informed me after the formal hearing that I need to have my rebuttal and closing arguments submitted by March 14, and that she will have her decision by April 15, she proceeded to tell me that neither I nor the Attorney General representing California Teacher Credential (CTC) will be notified at that time of her decision. Instead, she will send her judgment directly to CTC, which she believes -- but is not sure -- will then have somewhere between 90 and 120 days to come up with their own decision.
So, get this: CTC is under no obligation to follow her decision. Rather, CTC can decide on its own, in derogation of OAH and Judge Cohn, to either revoke or let me keep my credential…or something in between. One might reasonably ask, if CTC is under no obligation to follow Judge Cohn's OAH decision, why do we have an OAH hearing in the first place? Let me know if you have a good answer.
And of course, the intrinsic value of the OAH hearing is further called into question by the legal principle of collateral estoppel, which stands for the notion that issues that have been already litigated at my earlier hearing before the OAH relating to my firing by the LAUSD Board could not be relitigated in this proceeding -- even though virtually all my whistleblower defenses and evidence as to falsification of attendance, grades, high school graduation and procedures dealing with student behavior had been systematically ruled inadmissible in the earlier OAH proceeding, instead of being admitted as motive for my targeting.
But my favorite ruling by Judge Cohn was her allowing a 53-second segment of a video evidence by the California Attorney General (AG) as attorney for CTC to show that I was a racist. But when I wanted to offer videos of my own to show that I wasn't a racist, they were deemed by Judge Cohn to be inadmissible -- until I pointed out to her that the AG's admitted video was only a 53-second segment of one of my 12-minute videos that she had just refused to admit into evidence. Yes, even Judge Cohn finally had to reluctantly admit that this video was relevant as to the context of the AG's video; she allowed this complete video to be admitted -- but not the others. By the way, the topic of this video had to do with a racist LAUSD public education system that systematically continues to deprive minority children of an equal education 64 years after Brown vs. Board of Education.
The very reality of having this hearing to lift my teaching credential in the first place is even more bizarre when one realizes that I was placed on unpaid administrative leave pending firing by LAUSD in November 2010 and that the statute of limitations for the CTC to bring an action to revoke my credential has now long passed. Although this should have legally precluded the OAH action against me, as of this writing, it has not seemed enough to have Judge Cohn rule on it before a hearing to lift my credential (that, as a matter of law, is barred by the statute of limitations.)
It is also worth mentioning that since LAUSD suspended me and put me on unpaid administrative leave pending termination in November 2010, I have renewed my credential twice with CTC. One would think that if I was truly the racist they claim I am, they should have denied me these renewals.
As I finished writing this article, I got a call from a fellow teacher telling me he is under pressure from his principal to raise the grades of his students, even though that is not warranted. He tells me that, given my situation, he plans to knuckle under and do what he knows is wrong. What would you do?
(Leonard Isenberg is a Los Angeles, observer and a contributor to CityWatch. He was a second- generation teacher at LAUSD and blogs at perdaily.com. Leonard can be reached at [email protected].) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
