I am tiring of the recurring comments from media and elected officials of late that tensions between Knox County’s teachers and Superintendent Jim McIntyre are rooted in "a communication problem.”

No, tensions between teachers and the superintendent are rooted in great part by a violation of teachers’ rights under the U. S. Constitution.

Only two states nationally employ this unconstitutional teacher evaluation formula that leads to teachers being evaluated on the basis of test scores among students they never taught (and sometimes on the basis of test scores among students attending another school altogether). Those states are Arizona and Tennessee.

A third state, Florida, formerly employed this formula.

In April of 2013, the Florida Education Association (FEA) filed suit in Federal court over the formula, naming as defendants in the suit the Florida Commissioner of Education, Florida’s State Board of Education, and the three local school boards representing the districts employing the suit's seven teacher plaintiffs.

The lawsuit alleges that this method of assessment infringes on teachers’ due process and equal protection rights under the U. S. Constitution because the Florida law then allowed evaluations to be used in personnel decisions including raises and terminations.

Read the FEA complaint here.

Read Tampa-area news coverage of the filing here.

And read Governing magazine’s prediction that the suit is likely to be duplicated in Arizona and Tennessee here.

In June of 2013 Florida Governor Rick Scott signed into law a new teacher evaluation formula mandating that the state’s teacher evaluations be tied to the test scores of students they actually teach.

But since Florida’s new law did not address the widespread damage done to teachers’ careers during the two years in which the old formula was employed, it was too little, too late. The FEA suit continues.

Read Tampa-area news coverage of these developments here.

Now, the teacher-plaintiffs in this lawsuit were able to aver an injury in that their teaching careers were harmed by such arbitrary and capricious law.

But so, too, might any Florida school district have been able to aver the same injury, given that all districts were forced by the law to arbitrarily and capriciously award or deny teacher pay raises and to arbitrarily and capriciously retain or terminate teachers.

Too bad they didn’t assert that injury before somebody else did.

Meanwhile, north of the peninsula, the riot to have finally arisen among Knox County’s teachers is not indicative of any “communication problem” between them and Superintendent Jim McIntyre.

The riot is rooted in no small part to the exact same unconstitutional state law as Florida recently disavowed, which in its first year following implementation caused 55% of teachers statewide--a majority--to be subject to arbitrary and capricious evaluations.

Further, here in Tennessee these same teachers are also subject to an unconstitutional State Board of Education policy that may also strip them of the teaching license necessary to teach in any school, anywhere.

To add insult to these injuries, the Knox County Board of Education has even sent its superintendent to Washington, DC to promote this lonely and unconstitutional evaluation policy.

Hope springs eternal, but it sure does look like it’s their conscious choice to be sued, rather than to sue.