Teacher’s tough grading upheld in Louisiana

Tough graders got a lift this week, when a jury found in favor of a teacher who refused to change the D’s and F’s she doled out to her students. In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the West Feliciana Parish school system must pay more than $1.4 million to an English teacher who was suspended and demoted after refusing to change the low grades she gave to 70 percent of her students, a federal jury has found. The jury of four men and five women deliberated almost four hours before finding that the school board, superintendent and the principal at West Feliciana High School had harassed Paula Payne, violated her First Amendment rights and retaliated against her.

School system administrators said they never asked her to change any grades. The Superintendent said the teacher was suspended for five days in November 2004 because she refused to meet with administrators unless a Louisiana Education Association representative was there.

Until she resigned in 2005, the teacher (whose last name happened to be “Payne”) taught English at the school in St. Francisville, where students called her class the “House of Payne.” In the first six weeks of the fall 2004 semester, court documents show, she gave 70 percent of the school’s 180 sophomores a ‘D’ or an ‘F’ in English II. The low scores conflicted with those same students’ grades in other subjects as well as English grades for freshmen, juniors and seniors.

Payne now teaches English to inmates at Dixon Correctional Center.