Whitewashed in Washington State

I am Jeanell Malone from Spokane. I'm a parent, grandparent, and a passionate advocate of the right of every child in America to a free, safe, equal, quality public school education, a right we are currently not according them. I am a teacher of U.S. history and world geography who was unjustly fired by Spokane School District # 81 in 1995. I also have a minor in law, have been trained and employed as a paralegal, and have done extensive citizen legislative lobbying in another state.

POLITICIZING OF EDUCATION
(from testimony before the Washington State Senate Education Committee, 2/20/02, on SHB1444, the "bully bill")

SHB1444 is an excellent opportunity for me to discuss one of the concerns that I have not yet heard in public debate, the bullying, harassment, intimidation, retaliation, and coercion of and among school employees by other employees (particularly administrators), students, and parents. I have deemed the problem the politicizing of education. I believe that it is a root cause in the rise of school violence (if the adults don't respect each other, neither will the students), obstructs true school reform (actually allowing teachers to practice their profession ethically and responsibly), and prevents the retaining of quality teachers (new teachers are soon discouraged and resign; idealistic and capable people from other professions simply leave rather than fight a system where they are not allowed to function as they thought they could, healthily helping children to become responsible, caring, and productive adults; experienced teachers retire as soon as possible).

Now may I briefly share my story.

I've taught intermittently from 1963 to 1995 in three different areas of the U.S. for a total of over twenty years of experience, most recently at a large, relatively affluent, urban middle school, Sacajawea, in Spokane. I was dismayed at the decreasing work ethic and lack of respectful behavior in our school in the late 80's and early 90's and continued to ask the questions I'd been asking concerning structure and accountability, particularly as the co-chair of the staff/administration problem solving committee. In the spring of 1994 the senior counselor warned me that if I didn't stop asking those questions, it would be "dangerous to my health." I replied that I am a person of intelligence, integrity, character, ethics, and experience, that what the administrators and counselors were doing by promoting and following the current "self-esteem" philosophies was wrong and detrimental to both students and staff, and that I would not stop voicing my concerns. I was then undermined and harassed until I became angry; my verbalizing my anger, no differently than most other teachers, was misrepresented and falsified into "incidents"; and those incidents were utilized as an excuse to suspend and terminate me for "verbal child abuse". Although the principal frequently displayed angry outbursts that were much greater than mine, he was never confronted nor was any notation made in his evaluations. Similar incidents with other teachers who were not dissenters were ignored.

Incidentally, we teachers were not allowed to protect those [students] being bullied. [It is my contention that the teachers at Columbine High School did have knowledge that might have prevented that tragedy but knew they could not voice their concerns.]

The events of the last six years [now eight plus], as I have attempted to vindicate myself and resume my teaching career, read like a John Grisham novel. Despite my greatest efforts, justice has not been granted me and I have also very painfully discovered the many consequences of the politicizing of education, events and patterns of behavior that are "education's shameful little secrets." All the markers of classic abuse scenarios are present in my story. As with any organization or institution, such secrets are very difficult to reveal.

(excerpt from a letter to Washington State Attorney General Gregoire, 11/25/02, documenting the malfeasance and perjury of an assistant attorney general representing the Superintendent of Public Instruction at my informal hearing challenging the revocation of my teacher's certificate because I allegedly lacked the "personal fitness and good moral character to be a teacher")

Throughout the last nine years the scenario explicated above [first few pages of the letter] has been repeated a number of times causing me to seriously question the presence of any attempt to establish truth and justice in the legal/judicial system. It appears to me that all that is important is winning by any and all means, ethical, moral, or not, and supporting one's colleagues regardless of their behavior, as a means of maintaining power, control, and the status quo. Perhaps legal professionals no longer are able to recognize how little their advocacy resembles that envisioned in the Constitution and similar documents and how they violate their oath. From my experience and those related to me by many others, there apparently is little or no actual accountability for lawyers and judges in the state of Washington.

In my Submission [for the informal hearing, 11/18/02] I provided documentation and analysis that the principal at my school fabricated evidence against me in order to silence my dissent against and refusal to practice the now failed and abandoned "self-esteem" education philosophy because it was detrimental to my students. He forced the vice principal and others to provide false testimony against me because they feared for their jobs. His actions were validated and encouraged by his superiors. Read the official record.

Today, School Superintendent Bergeson began to acknowledge the inadequacy of the current education philosophy, educational testing and zero tolerance, by announcing that standards are to be lowered for the WASL, "to avoid lawsuits". In her State of Education address two weeks ago she acknowledged the crisis in recruiting and retaining teachers. And yet the OSPI refuses to acknowledge the validity of the issues I have raised and continues to allow and validate the coercion, silencing, and political assassination of staff members who professionally, ethically, and morally question the current fad philosophy, producing a "complacent culture with empty sentry boxes (New York Times, 2/17/02)." Is such a culture acceptable for our educational system?

From the initial document he drafted, the lawyer for the school district misrepresented, spun, fabricated, committed perjury and suborned perjury. I supplied and documented corrections. None were ever acknowledged. Read the official record.

My WEA [Washington Education Association] network lawyer refused to address the harassment and hostile work environment issues (as dictated by the union) and instead forced me into pleading an alternate much less valid defense. He committed perjury in his statements to the OSPI and then denied having spoken with them. He ultimately refused to bring the matter to a hearing. The union, acknowledging his "misrepresentations" promised to assign another lawyer and then refused to honor the commitment. Read the official record, particularly the current Submission.

I hired my own lawyer who refused to honor his timeline commitment, withheld documents from me, possibly in order to commit perjury in representations to the opposing lawyer and hearing officer, failed to copy my files for his use, refused to prepare for the hearing, refused to call witnesses in my favor, refused to enter documentation in my favor, refused to expose the perjury of the witnesses against me, refused to allow me to read his closing brief although he had promised to do so, refused to correct the mistakes in the brief, refused to draft Proposed Findings, etc., refused to correct the very flawed and perjured Proposed Findings of the school district lawyer, refused to inform me of or file a Motion for Reconsideration, refused to honor his commitment to appeal to Superior Court, and refused to forward all my files in his possession when he withdrew as my lawyer. Read the official record. The WSBA [Washington State Bar Association] ethics committee most unethically denied any wrongdoing after receiving my two-inch thick, well-documented, valid complaint.

The Hearing Officer [for my original Administrative Hearing of the appeal of my termination, 9/18-21/00] refused to consider the information I provided prior to my lawyer's withdrawal, copied the school district lawyer's Proposed Findings nearly verbatim despite their flawed and perjured nature, and then obviously could not believe the school district and its lawyer capable of such perfidy even though I proved it in my Motion for Reconsideration, and declined to reconsider or make any corrections. Read the official record.

The Superior Court Judge dismissed my even more detailed analysis and documentation as "repetitious", possibly acted upon the school district's lawyer's suggestion that the prior briefing by my former lawyer would be preferable to my non-lawyer efforts, rejected the extensive documentation of my former lawyer's malpractice, and upheld the Hearing Officer's Decision, Findings, etc., again without correction [11/13/01]. She also denied my Motion for Reconsideration [2/27/02]. Read the official record.

After having dismissed the complaint against me, the OSPI refiled it [10/10/00] when I insisted on exercising my legal right to a hearing in order to vindicate myself. When I asked questions concerning the propriety and legality of that refiling, as invited to do, the OSPI refused to answer those questions for a year and then did so with undocumented assertions, refusing to answer my questions and assuring me all would be just and fair. There never was an attempt to establish the actual facts or if the charges against me were justified. The public record of my Motions for Reconsideration and my Appeal to Superior Court were available to OSPI investigators. After refusing to acknowledge the evidence I had given and not receiving additional evidence from me, the OSPI issued a Proposed Order for Revocation [3/7/02], committing perjury and repeating the allegations I had proven false. Examine the OSPI files and read the official record.

The costs of the proceedings against me continue to mount. Actual expenses and the value of time expended probably exceeds a hundred thousand dollars, maybe two, most of it from taxpayers. The human costs are much more subtle. Some of my colleagues chose or felt pressured to bear false witness against me. Others at first asked me to subpoena them to testify for me, fearing similar retaliation by the principal. Later, they refused to provide even written testimony, learning of the failure of the legal system to protect me. Perhaps those who are paid to be involved have no moral issues concerning their actions but I can't believe so. And all of this has been deemed necessary and worth the cost by those in power in order to identify me as the problem and to avoid the examination of the systems and organizations involved.

The more egregious the events and proceedings became the more I resolved, as a person of integrity and a teacher of US history and the Constitution, to document and expose that egregiousness, with my most important goal being to truly provide the opportunity for a free, safe, equal, quality, public school education for every child in America. It has been difficult for me to acknowledge the extent of the perversion of power and the betrayal of public trust that I, and too many others, have personally experienced, often in isolation. I can only speculate that such perversion and betrayal continues because so few people dare acknowledge the corruption rampant in our country until they, themselves, are affected and then it's too late. However, in this last year whistle blowers and others have finally been heard and the abuse of power by a few to the detriment of many has been exposed in Enron, Arthur Anderson, the Roman Catholic Church, the FBI, etc., harbingers of many more to come.

May I remind you [Washington State Attorney General Gregoire] of your own lack of response when, after reading your report on violence in schools last spring [produced as President of the National Association of Attorneys General], I urged you to explore the politicizing of education as a root cause of school violence, as an obstruction to true school reform, and as a factor in the difficulty of recruiting and retaining quality teachers. I thought it ironic that you studied school violence in the very school where I taught and failed to discover this very covert and significant factor.

I shall await your response to my assertions and am willing to supply additional evidence. Meanwhile, I continue to document and search for an individual or an entity with the political and moral courage to acknowledge that this emperor has no clothes.

Update from the informal hearing concerning the revocation of my certificate, 11/18/02:

The previous section of the letter above detailed the errors of process in the informal hearing. The OSPI and Assistant Attorney General Coats unlawfully delayed the hearing for seven months, finally holding it 11/18/02. They refused to provide me with the procedural rules (not available elsewhere) until days before the hearing. They gave Coats' Submission to the committee members making the decision more than a month before the proceeding but refused to give mine (2 ½ inches thick with 75 exhibits) to them until the morning of the meeting, reassuring me that they would consider it over lunch if necessary. Ms. Coats, obviously knowing that she did not need to be prepared, made up her facts as she paged through her Submission. Although I exposed her inaccuracies and documented them to Attorney General Gregoire, all was ignored and my appeal was denied.

At the end of December 2002, I timely appealed for a Formal Hearing before the Office of Administrative Hearings and was delighted to find that the original evidence would be considered, supposedly as if there had been no prior proceedings. However, I began to suspect a repetition of the previous pretextuality when the Hearing Officer refused to subpoena all the witnesses necessary to expose the accurate facts and my suspicions were confirmed when he did not allow me to expose the extensive perjury and misinformation of the witnesses against me at the hearing, 3/24-27/03, nor would he allow me to present my own testimony as I had prepared. Although the Hearing Officer told the reporter that he would render a decision within a month, none has yet been given (hopefully due to my extensive letter documenting errors in due process submitted after the hearing). I have no doubt concerning the outcome.

Additionally, when I realized that perhaps the present laws were insufficient to protect teachers, I became reinvolved in political action, participating in a number of local campaigns and becoming a minor official of my party. I wanted to establish my credibility with the politicians so that when I proposed changes in the law, they would listen to me. My first opportunity was the "bully bill", referenced above. I proposed amendments including school employees as a protected class, asking for equal enforcement of required school policies by all for all, and protecting the rights of the accused, all approved by a representative, a former school superintendent. The Washington Education Association and the OSPI lobbied against my amendments, giving invalid excuses, and they were not adopted. Actually, there was no assistance from opposite party legislators from my own district and little from my seemingly sympathetic own party (none in the revocation proceedings), my assertions being politically unpopular.

I also appealed for assistance from the Governor and from the whistleblower section of the Auditor's office, but I was refused despite state laws authorizing them to intervene.

Conclusion

What I began in the early and mid-nineties as an examination and exposing of the inadequacies of our educational system and a defrauding of our children and taxpayers thereby, soon to be identified as a major national issue in the presidential election of 2000, expanded to include an exposure of the lack of protection, particularly for dissenters, and malfeasance by the teachers' union in the late nineties.

I then experienced the lack of advocacy and ethical action by a number of lawyers, particularly the two successively representing me, and the lack of due process and any attempt to establish accurate facts by the hearing and court system, with evidence that perjury is prevalent, pervasive and protected. Finally, I have experienced and documented malfeasance by at least five state agencies, most grievously, the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction and the Office of the Attorney General.

Essentially, I am a whistleblower and have been treated as such, losing nearly all except that which is of the most value, my integrity. I have reluctantly persevered, facing one indignity, injustice, and loss after another, to document the extent of the malfeasance of system after system. When will those who are in a position to make a difference listen and then act?

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