New York City’s tab for serving up flawed teacher certification exams decades ago now tops $850 million in damages paid, with still more reckoning to come, according to an attorney who successfully argued that the exams unfairly discriminated against Black and Latino test-takers.
Around 5,200 people who failed the tests have put in claim forms for lost wages, pensions, and other costs by a June deadline, according to the plaintiffs’ attorney, Joshua Sohn.
In 2021, when there were an estimated 4,700 claimants in the class-action lawsuit, the city agreed to set aside $1.8 billion to fund future judgments rather than continue the decadeslong legal battle.
“It’s taken way too long to get here,” Sohn said. “You can never give people back what they lost, what was taken from them. But it’s important that we’ve been fighting for them. And fighting for their entitlement to validate their experience.”
The damages total will grow as the hundreds of outstanding damages claims from test-takers are evaluated. The payments – part of the largest-ever payout by the city – represent lost wages, pensions and benefits for nearly 3,000 recipients thus far, Sohn said.
You can never give people back what they lost, what was taken from them. But it’s important that we’ve been fighting for them. And fighting for their entitlement to validate their experience.
Stefan Mooklal from the city's Law Department emailed the department’s response.
“The city mounted vigorous challenges to court rulings holding the city liable for a test developed and mandated by the state, but did not prevail. We continue to believe that those rulings were mistaken and unfairly burdened the city with costly judgments. But after our challenges proved unsuccessful, in 2021 the parties agreed that it was in their best interests to bring this long-standing case to a close,” the statement said.
Problems with the exam
At issue were a series of tests for acquiring and retaining teaching licenses in the city, including the National Teacher Examination Core Battery, or NTE, and its successor, the Liberal Arts and Sciences Test, or LAST.
The class-action lawsuit was brought in 1996 by four Black and Latino teachers who lost or were denied jobs, were demoted to substitute positions, and took salary cuts after failing the exams.
The average LAST pass rate was 93% for white test-takers, but 53% for Black and 50% for Latino test-takers, according to 1993 to 1995 state data referenced in the complaint. For the NTE, which was implemented in 1984, the complaint also claimed that the average pass rate was 84% for white test-takers, 44% for Black test-takers, and 40% for Latino test-takers.
Many of the plaintiffs continued to teach full time at public schools for lower pay, without full pensions and rights afforded to licensed teachers, their attorneys claimed.
“In practice then, the city and state used the LAST not to determine whether teachers should be allowed to teach, but rather to determine their level of compensation and benefits,” the plaintiffs argued in legal papers.
The state stopped requiring the tests as part of teacher certification after a federal judge found that the LAST exam had not been properly validated. U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood found in a 2012 ruling that the city Board of Education failed to prove that the tests were a proper measure of teachers’ ability.
Wood wrote in her Dec. 4, 2012 ruling that the city school board failed to prove the LAST had been properly validated or constructed. She wrote the board provided “no evidence regarding what tasks teachers perform on the job, what knowledge of the liberal arts and sciences teachers need to perform these tasks, or how the LAST’s subtopics relate to this knowledge.”
The board, Wood concluded, failed to present “convincing evidence” the LAST was related to the teachers’ jobs. As Sohn put it earlier, “The test obviously didn’t test anything relevant to the jobs that people were doing or being hired to do.”
Three years later, Wood objected to a second version of the LAST test, used from 2004 to 2012, finding it unfairly discriminated against Black and Latino applicants, in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
Wood wrote the exam “was not properly validated as job related, because the exam’s designers did not employ procedures to identify the specific areas and depth of knowledge of the liberal arts and sciences that any competent teacher would need to understand.”
Against that backdrop, the city opted to end the legal battle, and in 2021, under Mayor Bill de Blasio, it agreed to set aside nearly $1.8 billion to pay future judgments.
