Justice Sotomayor Denies Bid to Block Vaccine Mandate for New York City
School Employees
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has refused an emergency request by
a group of teachers challenging the New York City school system’s COVID-19
vaccination mandate.
Sotomayor late Friday acted as circuit justice covering the federal 2nd
Circuit, which includes New York state, without asking the New York City
Department of Education to file a response and without referring the matter to
the full court. She issued no comment on the denial.
Four teachers representing a class of other educators and school staff
challenged the school system’s mandate, part of a July 26 order by New York
City Mayor Bill de Blasio for most municipal employees that initially included
the option to get regular testing for the coronavirus instead of a vaccine. In
August, De Blasio eliminated the testing option for school employees but not
other city workers, though a separate arbitration proceeding allowed for
medical and religious exemptions.
The group of teachers argued that the mandate violates their equal protection
and due process rights under the 14th Amendment. On Sept. 23, a federal
district judge in New York City rejected their request for an injunction to
block the mandate. The judge cited Jacobson v. Massachusetts, a 1905 Supreme
Court decision that upheld a state law giving municipalities the power to
adopt financial penalties for adults who refused to be vaccinated against
smallpox.
“Mandating a vaccine approved by the [Food and Drug Administration] does not”
qualify as a “plain, palpable invasion” of the teachers’ fundamental rights,
the judge said.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, in New York City, denied the
teachers’ appeal in a one-page order on Sept. 27.
In their emergency request to Sotomayor in Maniscalco v. New York City
Department of Education (No. 21A50), the teachers say the vaccine mandate will
force them out of work and leave the school system with a major staffing
shortage.
“This court should grant the injunction after nearly two years of lockdowns,
to prevent the largest public-school system in the country from further
disrupting the education of hundreds of thousands of students who desperately
need in-person teachers,” the filing said.
Under the mandate, the city’s 148,000 school employees had until 5 p.m. on
Oct. 1 to get their first vaccine shot or else face suspension without pay on
Oct. 4.
Stop Wasting Your Time on School Improvement Plans That Don’t Work. Try This Instead
Too often, the required actions leaders must accomplish from year to year become acts of compliance rather than opportunities to learn. When this happens, leaders often feel more reactive than proactive and feel as though they can never engage in the instructional-leadership practices they read so much about.
The examples above are just a few of those actions that are sometimes viewed as tasks to get over with instead of tasks that we can learn from in our profession. In these times of increased workloads, teacher shortages, staff burnout, and high levels of anxiety on the part of teachers, staff, and leaders, we need to refocus our efforts on those areas that can bring us the most value and perhaps improve our mindsets around those actions we have always taken but didn’t get much bang for our buck.
A few weeks ago, I was facilitating days 3 and 4 of a six-day instructional-leadership professional learning series with teams across Arkansas. The focus of the learning is developing collective leader efficacy (which you can learn more about in this video). It occurs when leadership teams develop a shared conviction that they can have an impact on student learning and achievement. Basically, collective leader efficacy is a “researchy” way of understanding how teams come together from a social-emotional and academic perspective.
One of the most useful actions that teams can take when they are working together is to create a theory of action. Theories of action help teams understand what problem they are trying to solve and will help those teams develop a common language and common understanding around that problem. It provides them with a space to engage in conversations about how teachers in the school are doing the work already and creates an opportunity to talk about how they can go deeper with practices to help them solve their problem. Additionally, theories of action help the instructional-leadership team stay focused, so they can be empowered and feel proactive as opposed to feeling reactive.
I recently developed a theory of action for work I’m involved in as a lead advisory for the state of Washington with directors of teaching and learning and am providing it as an example here. If we want leaders and teachers in our district to possess the necessary understanding, knowledge, and skills to impact student learning, then we as directors of teaching and learning need to focus on what necessary understanding, knowledge, and skills are needed to do that work.
In our district, teachers are using a lot of high-impact strategies but are not implementing those strategies correctly and, therefore, not making an impact on student learning.
Engage teachers in the discussion about this focus before, during, and after instead of just creating workshops for them where they have little background knowledge.
As you can see, developing a theory of action includes understanding our assumptions and choosing a few high-impact strategies we can take to put our theory of action into … well, action. Not to get into the weeds in this blog, but theories of action should also include success criteria, meaning what will success look like if we effectively complete our theory of action?
From there, we create a program logic model to outline how we will implement the work. This brings us back to our school improvement plans. School improvement plans should focus on helping teams focus on the problem they are trying to solve and be seen as a workable document that is useful to help schools improve or go deeper with their learning as an organization.
Unfortunately, in many educational circles, the mention of school improvement plans sucks the oxygen out of the room and makes the eyes of educators gloss over to the extent that they begin daydreaming about a day when school improvement plans will prove to be useful, because, in too many cases, they are acts of compliance. This is not new information, because many researchers who have come before me have talked about this. Sadly, though, it is still an issue with many leaders.
Why do we do that? Why do we spend countless hours creating a document that we really do not plan on using in practical ways because we only created it to check a box of compliance for our districts or state education department. We can accuse the district or state for requiring such complicated and unuseful documents, but in many cases, they are not to blame. We all have a tendency to create a document using big educational words when, in reality, we should be creating documents we can actually use and those teachers and staff around us understand.
It’s a missed opportunity and one that we desperately need to change. The stress and workload of leaders and teachers has increased tremendously over the past decade, and we need to identify those actions we take that our impactful and replace those actions that do not have an impact at all. One such action that needs to be replaced is that of putting together a school improvement plan that we cannot, or choose not, to use.
I recently began discussions about de-implementation and published a book on the topic in the late spring. De-implementation is the abandonment of low-value practices, which you can learn more about here. There are two ways of looking at de-implementation, which is through a partial reduction or a replacement action. In this blog, I focus on partial reductions, but I believe the discussion about school improvement plans should be a focus for the replacement action.
Think of all the time that goes into creating a school improvement plan. Just imagine if that time spent on creating the plan actually proved to be useful in our meetings, planning, and day-to-day walk-throughs and conversations with teachers.
The case is the second time recently that a Supreme Court justice has refused
an emergency request to block a vaccine mandate in education. On Aug. 12,
Justice Amy Coney Barrett denied a request to block Indiana University’s
vaccine mandate.
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