Montgomery School

A federal appeals court has revived the pregnancy-discrimination lawsuit of a Florida teacher who was fired from a Florida Christian school purportedly because she had disobeyed “the word of God” by engaging in premarital sex.

The school might have been able to raise the “ministerial exception” to job-bias laws recently recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court, but the appeals court said the school failed to properly raise the defense.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit, in Atlanta, ruled unanimously that teacher Jarretta Hamilton’s case should go before a jury. Hamilton conceived a child in January 2009 with her fiance, one month before they married, court papers say.

The teacher went to her superiors at Southland Christian School in Kissimmee, Fla., in April of that year to reveal her pregnancy and seek maternity leave. During the meeting, Hamilton acknowledged that she had conceived the child before getting married. The school fired her a few days later, with the school’s administrator, John Ennis, telling her, “there are consequences for disobeying the word of God,” her lawsuit alleged.

Hamilton sued based on Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the federal anti-discrimination law that was amended in 1978 to cover job bias based on pregnancy. A federal district court dismissed the pregnancy-discrimination claim, ruling that the Hamilton had not established a “prima facie” case of bias because she had not shown that comparatively situated non-pregnant workers were treated differently.

In its May 16 decision in Hamilton v. Southland Christian School, the 11th Circuit court panel reversed the district court and held that the teacher did allege a facial case of discrimination.

The court noted that Title VII does not protect job actions based on premarital sex, but does protect against pregnancy discrimination.

“Hamilton presented evidence that, in making the decision to fire her, Southland was more concerned about her pregnancy and her request to take maternity leave than about her admission that she had premarital sex,” the 11th Circuit court said.

For example, the teacher testified at deposition that, after she told the administrators about her pregnancy but before she told them she had conceived before getting married, John Ennis “put his head back and he said, ‘we feared something like this would happen,’” the opinion recounts.

The school did raise the “ministerial exception” as a defense at the district court level, but the district judge said it didn’t apply in Hamilton’s case.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court ruled earlier this year in Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that there is a broad “ministerial exception” that churches may invoke in defense of job-discrimination claims by the ministers of their faith. The high court that a Lutheran teacher who had been trained in the faith’s ministry and had some religious duties at her school could not sue over alleged disability discrimination.

In the Florida case, which was evidently argued before the 11th Circuit court before Hosanna-Tabor was decided on Jan. 11, the appeals court said Southland Christian School could have raised the ministerial exception as one defense to Hamilton’s suit. But the school mentioned the issue only in passing in its briefs.

“Southland abandoned that exception as a defense by failing to list or otherwise state it as an issue on appeal,” the court said. “A passing reference to an issue in a brief is not enough, and the failure to make arguments and cite authorities in support of an issue waives it.”

The court said that because the school did not properly assert the ministerial exception defense, it was not deciding whether it might apply in this case.

The court said Hamilton has established a “genuine issue of material fact” about the actual reason why she was fired, and that is a question for a jury to decide.

When choosing the vocabulary words or phrases to fill in a sentence or paragraph in the text completion section of the GRE, note the relationships between the clauses within a sentence and between the sentences themselves.  Often there will be a direction change signaled by a contrast word such as but or yet. Another common relationship is consistent ideas.  Some words that show consistent ideas are:

both

and

in addition

additionally

then

too

also

nor

moreover

etc.

If your blanks represent consistent ideas signaled by your key word (such as and), the correct choices will be similar in tone (both positive or both negative) and/or meaning.  However, be aware that while you may have consistent ideas, a negative in one clause such as not means your correct choices should actually be opposites.

For example:

My aunt suffered from _______ migraines, and sometimes the pain was not _________.

Because of the negative clue suffered in the first clause, you can predict that the first blank will be some kind of negative word such as terrible.  The and signals that the second clause will contain a similar idea as the first, but that does not mean that the second blank will also be negative since we have the word not.  Because of not, we actually want a word that means the opposite of terrible, so a positive word such as bearable would be the best choice for the second blank.

As with any text completion question, remember that there could be multiple relationships within the text.  Maybe there are consistent ideas in the first sentence, the second sentence contrast with the first, and the third sentence contains a blank that is defined within the sentence.  The more comfortable you are with spotting these clues, the more you will be able to use them to your advantage to complete the text correctly.

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How about this infographic from Turnitin to start the week? From a  Turnitin are trying to understand what kinds of plagiarism were the most common in academia and, equally importantly, which were viewed as being the most problematic.

1. Clone: Verbatim copying without additions/subtractions.
2. CTRL+C: Largely verbatim copying from a single source with minor changes.
3. Find-Replace: Verbatim copying with key words/phrases changed, often automatically.
4. Remix: Paraphrasing content so that it flows seamlessly with other work.
5. Recycle: Plagiarizing from older works of your own .
6. Hybrid: Combining correctly cited material with non-cited material in the same passage.
7. Mashup: A mix of copied and original content from various sources without attribution.
8. 404 Error: Including citations that do not exist or are inaccurate.
9. Aggregator: Properly cited material that contains little original content.
10. Re-Tweet: Includes proper citation but uses too much of the original wording, content that should have been quoted but was paraphrased.

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The interesting points for me are the frequency results, with the clone (direct copy, word for word) and the mashup (mixed copies, multiple sources) coming out as the most frequent offences, whilst the clone and Ctrl-C (which are basically the same?) as the most problematic or cause the most concern but the re-tweet and remix as the least problematic.

The article linked to above (click the image) has a good summary of the categories as well as the full infographic. The survey also concludes with the advice that students should be included and encouraged to review their Institutions plagiarism policy, with the following recommendations;

• Inform: Share the plagiarism spectrum with the students and use it as a guide to inform them of the ways in which plagiarism can take form.
• Intent: The plagiarism spectrum emphasises the range of intent behind the student plagiarism. use the spectrum to guide decisions about appropriate responses to plagiarism.
• Originality Checking: Give students access to their Originality Reports so that they can see how they may have inappropriately used or referenced source material.

This work, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a .

As a policy wonk, I push for high academic expectations for all students, writes Scott Joftus in Education Next. As a father, however, I find that what matters most to me is that my daughters are happy in school.

Over more than 20 years in the field of education—including two with Teach For America—I have helped promote state standards, the Common Core, the hiring of teachers with strong content knowledge, longer class periods for math and reading, and extra support for struggling students, to name a few. I have recently discovered, however, that what I believe as an education policy wonk is not always what I believe as a father.

Joftuss wonk side believes student learning flourishes in classrooms that include students with a wide range of abilities and backgrounds.  However, as a Dad, he admits to getting angry when a troubled kindergartener disrupts his daughters class and forces the talented, but inexperienced teacher to spend more than half of her time trying to keep this boy on task.

I feel for children like him; my company works with schools and districts to improve outcomes for these kids. But I was angry. The other children were clearly uncomfortable. His disruptions reduced learning time for my daughter, and seemed to steal some of her innocence and excitement about school.

Commenters on the Ed Next blog offer both praise and criticism for Joftus.  Teachers have been fighting policy wonks who have been destroying the happy learning environment for decades, writes one.  But you don’t listen, it is only when it becomes personal that you reconsider your opinions and admit the possibility that teachers have been right all along.  Had you guys listened twenty years ago, and respected our wisdom on safe and orderly schools, this educational civil war would not have had to happen, observes veteran teacher and ed blogger John Thompson.

Rocketship schools CEO John Danner admits to similar cognitive dissonance when sending his kids to school.  However, I would challenge you as your kids grow to think more about how those skills jibe with rigor, he writes. Rigor is actually a form of compassion. A teacher who expects a lot of their students prevents them from feeling the frustration your children feel now, but much later in their school career.  The real problem you are seeing is that your child’s teacher has high expectations but doesnt understand how to differentiate.

Loftus tale serves to illustrate how regrettably wide the gulf can be between policy ideals and classroom realities.  The policies Loftus has worked to supportstandards, improved teacher quality, enhanced learning time for strugglers, et al.   are laudable, but risk melting into insignificance in the face of teachers overwhelmed with a critical mass of disruptive children in her room.  I dont have any data on this, but I suspect that far fewer parents than wonks tend to lay the problem of learning time lost to disruption at the feet of teachers.  It is easy to say, as Danner does differentiate.  It is difficult, and always will be, to expect every teacher in every classroom to have the training, expertise and experience to handle every challenge offered up by 25 free agents in their classrooms every day.

The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.

AUSTIN — The editorial board of the University of Texas student newspaper has apologized for a racially charged cartoon about media coverage of the killing of a Florida teen.

The Daily Texans five-member editorial board apologized Wednesday night, a day after publishing the cartoon about the death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.

The unarmed black youth was shot last month by a white neighborhood watch volunteer in Sanford, Fla. The volunteer, George Zimmerman, claimed self-defense.

The Daily Texan cartoon mentioned the race of both individuals, using a racial slur to describe Martin. The cartoon also criticized the medias coverage of the death, describing it as yellow journalism.  The cartoon portrayed a mother reading to a child about the killing.

The student newspaper published the cartoon on Tuesday, but then removed it from its website.  Then on Wednesday, the paper re-published the cartoon with this statement: