Suing Baltimore schools won’t make them better
Can you sue an entire city school system to make it better educate kids? Can a judge order Baltimore’s teachers, truancy officers and administrators to be more competent and effective in their jobs?
It sounds great — and appears to be the upshot of the Jovani Patterson lawsuit against the city schools — but that’s not the way the world works.
Judges can’t slam gavels and suddenly improve school attendance and test scores or keep bureaucrats from making mistakes.
But the Patterson lawsuit, in which a taxpayer asks a Baltimore Circuit Court judge to order remedies that thousands of people would have liked to see decades ago, seems to suggest exactly that.
Without a doubt, the record of the city schools is not good, with a lot of failure over the years. A civil rights lawyer could credibly argue that such a record has deprived thousands of kids of a better life. In fact, the Patterson lawsuit — which was filed in 2022 and has the backing of The Sun’s new co-owner, David Smith — makes such a claim, and I don’t know anyone who would argue with that point.
But is the solution a lawsuit?
And even before we address that large question, there’s a baseline legal one: Does Jovani Patterson, a former Republican candidate for Baltimore City Council, have standing to move this suit forward?
Again, it sounds good: A taxpayer feels a government agency is failing to do its job and even willfully wasting money, so he goes to court to put a stop to it.
But, under the doctrine of legal standing, Patterson, the lead plaintiff, would have to show direct harm.
That’s not a technicality; that’s a fundamental principle in the world of legal grievances.
Example: If the city proposes to demolish my house, I have standing to oppose that action because a judge could do something about it. The city could be ordered to suspend those plans or scrap them altogether.
That’s why it’s baffling that Circuit Judge John S. Nugent has allowed the Patterson lawsuit to move forward.
Even if he agrees with the long list of depressing points about the failings of the schools made in the lawsuit, how would Nugent grant relief to Patterson?
“Taxpayer standing requires some harm to the plaintiff apart from the general public,” says John Lynch, a longtime professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law who reviewed the Patterson lawsuit at my request. “If the harm alleged affects the entire public, the remedy is for the political branches to remedy.”
That’s why we have an educational system, and legislative and executive branches to fund it and set policy.
Lynch described the Patterson suit as “an artful attempt to avoid the ‘educational malpractice’ limit on
involvement by courts in the public schools.”
That’s a reference to a case that emanated from Montgomery County in 1980, the first of its kind in Maryland. Parents sued the county schools for damages, arguing that their son had been deprived of a quality education. The Maryland Court of Appeals (since renamed the Supreme Court of Maryland) refused to establish “educational malpractice” as a new tort and said education was best left to educators, not judges.
From the opinion: “The courts, on constitutional grounds, can decide that all schools must afford equal protections of the laws, but courts may not decide the curriculum, nor the degree of proficiency needed to advance from grade to grade through the school system.
The field of education is simply too fraught with unanswered questions for the courts to constitute themselves as a proper forum for resolution of those questions.”
In the Patterson case, lawyers for the plaintiff argue that the lawsuit does not claim “educational malpractice” but wrongful acts by Baltimore school officials — overstating enrollment, inflating grades and engaging in the “social promotion” of students from one grade to the next. The grievances, they say, are about mismanagement and wasteful spending.
Lynch says that doesn’t matter. The cautious standard set in the Montgomery County case, limiting judicial involvement in running schools, should still apply.
“Of course the plaintiffs are not going to cast their suit as one of educational malpractice,” Lynch wrote in an email. “But a taxpayer’s suit such as this has the potential to have courts telling school administrators how to do their jobs, and courts are usually reluctant to do that.”
As they should be. Nonetheless, Judge Nugent denied the city’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit. Since then, Patterson has been deposed and Sun owner David Smith, who’s also the executive chairman of the Sinclair Broadcast Group, has been subpoenaed to give a deposition about his involvement in the case.
Meanwhile, one of the lawsuit’s major allegations — that of “widespread grade inflation” by teachers and administrators — would seem to be substantially weakened by the results of a recently concluded audit. Ordered by the state’s Department of Education, the review of millions of school records found “no widespread grade manipulation” across the system.
Overall, the allegations in the suit seem minor relative to the much larger, deeprooted issues facing public education in Baltimore.
Teaching children, many of them from some of the poorest households in Maryland, has always been a challenge, and it continues to be. That’s one reason why one of the wealthiest states in the country is undertaking a bold, decadelong effort to improve schools and the life outcomes for thousands of kids. It’s hard and important work that should take place in classrooms, not courtrooms.