In Successful Fight to Keep Job, Music Teacher Cited Double Standard by City
By DAVID W. CHEN
Published: April 6, 2012,The New York Times
He had tickled them in their midsection, the city’s investigative report said. He even cradled one boy, and cooed a lullaby, before kissing him on the forehead, the report said.The New York City Education Department wanted to fire Michael Dalton, a music teacher in Washington Heights, after its investigators said that he had placed three third-grade boys on his lap in what they considered an inappropriate manner.
But wait, said Mr. Dalton, when he finally had a chance to defend himself.
He presented a photo of Joel I. Klein, the schools chancellor at the time, surrounded by three beaming students. It was hard to tell whether one of those students is in Mr. Klein’s lap, or just standing in front of him, but it is clear, an arbitrator concluded, that Mr. Klein’s “arm is either wrapped around the child or resting in front of the child.”
“The facts regarding Mr. Dalton demonstrate a clear case of disparate treatment,” the arbitrator, Bonnie Siber Weinstock, wrote in July 2010. She ruled that the tickling and kissing were inappropriate, but not sexual. Ruing the lack of clear standards on what school employees could and could not do, she rejected the city’s attempt to fire Mr. Dalton and instead fined him $2,000.
Mr. Dalton, who is 48, was one of 16 teachers the city sought to fire in recent years, saying they had behaved inappropriately with children, but who were allowed to return to the classroom after an arbitrator chose to give them a lesser penalty like a fine, a suspension or a reprimand. Two of those 16, one of them Mr. Dalton, have been removed from the classroom again because of new accusations against them.
The handling of teachers accused of behaving improperly with students has become an uncomfortable issue for City Hall in the past few months. At least seven school employees have been arrested this year, accused of sexual offenses involving pupils. Two of them had been found to have acted inappropriately around students, but were allowed to keep working.
Asked about the 16 cases on his radio show on Friday, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said that some of the rulings “don’t make any sense,” perhaps because arbitrators, who must be approved by both the Education Department and the teachers’ union, were loath to impose the stiffest penalties.
“Maybe if you were a serial ax murderer you might get a slap on the wrist," he said.
But Michael Mulgrew, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, scoffed at criticism of the 3020-a hearings, named after the section of the state law that guarantees tenured teachers a chance to defend themselves before an arbitrator before they can be fired.
“If their position now is that the 3020-a process didn’t work, they haven’t even used their tools,” he said. “If they felt something went wrong, they should’ve appealed it.”
Mr. Dalton said that the new complaint against him was neither sexual nor criminal, and that it was being looked at by the department’s Office of Special Investigation, not the Office of the Special Commissioner of Investigation, which handles more serious cases. Neither Mr. Dalton nor the department would elaborate.
But his previous case provides a window into the complicated, sometimes uncomfortable world of teacher discipline. “The notion of inappropriate physical contact can be the type of charge that ends a pedagogue’s career,” Ms. Weinstock wrote. “However, before termination is the penalty selected, the record evidence must be quite clear.”
The case involved a class Mr. Dalton was teaching in the 2007-8 school year at Washington Heights Academy. He “scooped” up one student, for instance, and rocked him as if he were a baby, sang a lullaby, then kissed him on the forehead, according to the Office of the Special Commissioner of Investigation report.
One student, when asked by city investigators whether the tickling was fun, said, “Kind of in the middle.”
During his arbitration hearing, Mr. Dalton, sounding contrite, said, “I confused my role as an uncle and a neighbor with my role as teacher, and that in those cases, tickling is not a big deal.” But tickling in the classroom, he agreed, “leaves lots of questions open as to what’s going on.”
But Mr. Dalton also challenged the effort to fire him. In addition to the photo of Mr. Klein, he provided a photo of a female colleague on a trip with kindergarten students. She was seated on the floor, legs crossed, with a female student’s “buttocks touching the inner portion of the teacher’s thighs,” according to the arbitrator’s ruling.
The arbitrator, Ms. Weinstock, concluded that Mr. Dalton’s contact was not sexual, and found his “remorse to be sincere.”
In an interview on Friday, Mr. Dalton, who most recently taught at Intermediate School 143 in Washington Heights, defended the arbitration process as fair. He suggested that his difficulties in 2008 were rooted in his poor relationship with his principal at the time.
“The reason this is important is because principals are not necessarily principled, and they can use the system to remove teachers they’re at odds with,” he said.
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