Failure is being rewarded big time in the Big Apple.
In what is the largest legal payout in its history, New York City will award about 5,200 former and aspiring minority teachers $1.8 billion – all because they failed a certification exam that was found to be biased.
The settlement came after the city stopped fighting an almost decades-long federal discrimination lawsuit, according to the New York Post, which came in the final weeks of former Mayor Bill de Blasio's administration.
Last week, 225 individuals who failed a liberal arts and science test used to license teachers from 1994 to 2014 were told they would be getting at least $1 million. Some judgments are in the hundreds, however.
Payouts are based on what they would've earned as teachers had they ever passed the test and worked in the school system.
The class-action suit dates back to 1996 when it was filed on behalf of Elsa Gulino and three other teachers against the former Board of Education, which once ran the city’s public schools before it was disbanded by the state Legislature to give that power to the mayoral-controlled Department of Education.
The plaintiffs targeted both the state and city, but an appeals court ultimately let Albany off the hook since the city is the teachers’ employer — even though the city argued it had no control over the testing.
The case has had a winding road through the court system, including repeated trips to appellate courts.
A 2003 trial ended in the city’s favor, but the tests were ruled discriminatory in 2012 by the third Manhattan federal judge to handle the case.
The city Law Department insisted it pursued all legal avenues before finally deciding to bring the longstanding case to a close. (New York Post)
The man who walked away with the most, Herman Grim, is now a multimillionaire.
On July 5, the 64-year-old was awarded $2,055,383, which included over $1.5 million for time he didn't work as well as lost interest accrued.
Grim said he took the test multiple times and repeatedly failed, despite even hiring tutors to help him study.
He couldn't tell the Post why the objective test was apparently biased.
Meet Herman Grim, who was just awarded $2,055,383 from New York State.
— Jeremy Kauffman 🦔 (@jeremykauffman) July 18, 2023
Why? Because black people failed an objective test called the National Teacher Examination more often than other races.
Mr. Grim failed "many times". As he's interviewed, his smoke detector chirps 3 times. pic.twitter.com/MzvVSDvTER
More than 90% of white test-takers passed the 80-question multiple-choice and essay Liberal Arts and Sciences Test between March 1993 and June 1995 — one version of which had questions such as asking teachers to explain the meaning of a painting by pop artist Andy Warhol.
But black applicants on average scored passing grades only 53% of the time, and Latinos had an even lower passing rate, just 50%, according to the lawsuit.
The failures resulted in full-time teachers getting demoted to substitutes and prevented aspiring educators from getting hired.
Some became career subs, others found teaching jobs outside the city, and the rest left the profession.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs brought in experts who testified that much of the discrepancy in scores could be attributed to some of the questions being culturally biased in favor of whites.
In 2012, Manhattan federal Judge Kimba Wood ruled that requiring teachers to pass the Liberal Arts and Sciences Test violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because it wasn’t a proper indicator of better-performing teachers.
She sided with the plaintiffs, who said the test had an illegal “disparate impact” on blacks and Latinos and that the city’s school system was liable for making hiring decisions based on its results.
The city argued it was simply following teaching licensing requirements mandated by the state and didn’t have any authority over the tests. (New York Post)
One principal from Brooklyn blasted the city for settling.
"The standards are the standards," he said, according to the Post. "It shouldn't be based on what would be easy for blacks or whites. To hire people who are not qualified and change the requirements because a certain group didn't pass the test is bulls–t."