The New Education Malpractice Litigation

For a brief moment during the 1970s, a serious possibility existed that the legal principle of negligence might be applied in the context of public education much like it had already been applied in other professional contexts. [...] The first such “education malpractice” lawsuit, Peter Doe v. San Francisco Unified School District, was filed in California Superior Court just two years later, and a similar case was brought in New York shortly thereafter. Responding to these filings, interested school reformers and education lawyers buzzed with excitement about the prospect that schools might be held accountable to individual students and their parents for negligent instructional practices that resulted in deficient educational attainment. [...] The buzz did not last long. California’s courts quickly rejected the contention that public schools should be held liable in tort for educational malpractice, and New York courts soon followed suit. Additional lawsuits were filed in other state courts in the ensuing years, but uniformly—with the solitary exception of a unique Montana special education case—those suits would meet the same end. (p. 10)