Hearne v. Bd. of Education City of Chicago

• Decision Date: 16 July 1999
• Docket Number: No. 98-1403,98-1403
• Citation: 185 F.3d 770
• Parties: (7th Cir. 1999) Joseph Hearne, et al., Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. Board of Education of the City of Chicago, et al., Defendants-Appellees
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit

Page 770

185 F.3d 770 (7th Cir. 1999)

Joseph Hearne, et al., Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. Board of Education of the City of Chicago, et al., Defendants-Appellees.

No. 98-1403

United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit

Argued November 13, 1998

Decided July 16, 1999

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division. No. 97 C 3345--James B. Zagel, Judge. [Copyrighted Material Omitted] Before Cummings, Rovner, and Diane P. Wood, Circuit Judges.^*

Diane P. Wood, Circuit Judge.

In 1995, the Illinois General Assembly enacted Public Act 89- 15, a broad-ranging measure designed to reform the Chicago public school system. In this case, teachers and other tenured employees of the Chicago Board of Education who were terminated from their jobs under the procedures established by the new legislation, together with the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), sought declaratory and injunctive relief against certain sections of that statute. The individual plaintiffs also requested reinstatement and damages. The district court dismissed the bulk of the complaint for lack of jurisdiction and the remainder for failure to state a claim upon which relief could be granted. With one exception, we agree that none of the plaintiffs can proceed with the case, and we therefore affirm. We order the remaining claim reinstated and stayed pending the outcome of certain parallel litigation in the state courts.

I

Underlying all of the plaintiffs' complaints is the undisputed fact that Public Act 89-15 applies only to the Chicago public school system--a system that the General Assembly expressly found to be in the throes of an "educational crisis." For many years, the Chicago schools have operated under provisions of the Illinois School Code that were tailor-made for them. Article 34, which establishes the school law for cities with more than 500,000 inhabitants, has been on the books for more than 35 years. See 105 ILCS 5/34-1 et seq. That population threshold has traditionally been a euphemism for the name "Chicago"; Article 34 has never applied to any other city, though it is of course possible that population growth in the future might ultimately bring places like Rockford (pop. 143,263) and Peoria (pop. 113,504) under its aegis if the legislature does not adjust the cut-off point.

Plaintiff Joseph Hearne, an African American, was a tenured teacher in the Chicago public school system. Plaintiffs Linda Daley and Andrew Hoffman, also African Americans, were career service employees of the Board of Education (to which we refer here as the "Reform Board," following the accepted post-amendment usage). Plaintiff CTU was and is the exclusive collective bargaining agent for more than 31,000 employees of the Reform Board, including teachers, certain assistant principals, school clerks, and teacher assistants. A majority of the individuals (51.7%) in the bargaining unit represented by the CTU (at the relevant time) were African Americans; minorities as a group were 64.6% of the bargaining unit. African Americans working as civil or career service employees (i.e. those who do not have teaching certificates) at the Reform Board accounted for 63.1% of the workforce; minorities as a whole were 83.3%.

The General Assembly passed Public Act 89-15 on May 30, 1995. At that time, as a result of Republican victories at the polls in November 1994 and before, Republicans controlled both houses of the state legislature, and the Governor of Illinois, Jim Edgar, was also a Republican. This was despite, not because of, the efforts of the CTU and its members, who had unsuccessfully tried during the Fall 1994 election campaign to defeat the Republican candidates. Noting both this fact and the demographic fact that most of the legislators in the Republican majority hailed from downstate Illinois or the Chicago suburbs, the plaintiffs claimed in their lawsuit that Public Act 89-15 was passed to retaliate against them for their political activities.

According to the complaint, the legislation accomplished its retaliatory purpose in several ways. First, it amended section 34-15 of the Illinois School Code, 105 ILCS 5/34-15, to diminish the level of civil service protection available to career service employees. Prior to the amendment, these employees had the right to be terminated only for cause, and they had the right to independent judicial review of the hearing officer's decision in any termination case; afterwards, dismissal was possible without any showing of cause for Chicago employees, but the old system remained in place for educational employees elsewhere in the state. Second, the new legislation amended section 34-85 of the School Code, 105 ILCS 5/34-85, in a way that made it easier to fire tenured teachers. Before, Chicago public school teachers could obtain tenure after a three-year probationary period, and tenured teachers could be removed only for cause after a hearing before an independent hearing officer. The new legislation significantly reduced the procedural protections available to teachers facing removal. The hearing officer's decision was no longer final, but instead became a recommendation to the Reform Board. Furthermore, the Reform Board itself was not expressly required to follow any particular procedures in coming to its own conclusion. Once again, these restrictions apply only to Chicago teachers; all other public school teachers in the state are entitled to have an independent hearing officer, not their employer, make the final termination decision. Last, Public Act 89-15 restricts the collective bargaining rights of Reform Board employees. In Chicago only, career service employees may no longer bargain over job security matters, and educational employees are precluded from bargaining over issues like the impact of charter schools on personnel, decisions to privatize and their impact on employees, layoffs and reductions in force, class size decisions, and the impact of experimental and pilot programs.

On May 6, 1997, the plaintiffs filed their complaint. They asserted claims under 42 U.S.C. sec.sec. 1981, 1982, and 1983 and under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C. sec. 2000e et seq., against the Reform Board, the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board (IELRB), the State of Illinois, and Jim Edgar, then the Governor of Illinois. The complaint alleged that Public Act 89-15 violated the plaintiffs' rights under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, because it was a thinly disguised mechanism for racial discrimination and discrimination on the basis of political activity or affiliation, and that it deprived them of their property interest in continued employment without due process. The defendants responded with a motion to dismiss under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b), which the district court granted on January 14, 1998.

In its memorandum opinion, the court found that the suit for damages against the State, the Governor, and the IELRB was barred by the Eleventh Amendment. The Title VII suit against the State, while not vulnerable under the Eleventh Amendment was without merit because the State was not the relevant employer--the Reform Board was. Furthermore, the court found that the complaint had not asked for any injunctive relief against the State, the Governor, or the IELRB that properly could be granted. With respect to Hearne's claim, the court decided to abstain and dismiss because Hearne was also proceeding with a state court appeal of the Reform Board's decision to fire him. The court found no merit in Hoffman and Daley's claims, which, as with the CTU's claims, focused on the absence of a binding decision by an independent hearing officer. This was something that possibly could have been a subject of collective bargaining between the CTU and the Reform Board, the court thought, but the CTU had elected not to pursue that course. Until it did so, the district court implied that this aspect of the case was not ripe for decision. In any event, the district court held, there is no federal constitutional right to a procedure whereby the final decision is made by a hearing officer rather than the agency, no matter what rights state law may or may not have conveyed at any point. Last, the court rejected all claims based on the theory that singling out Chicago for unfavorable treatment was a proxy for discrimination based on race and political affiliation. It found a rational basis for treating the Chicago public school system differently from others in the state, and it found that in these circumstances it was not appropriate to probe the motives of the members of the General Assembly who voted for the law to see if race or political retaliation played a part in their thinking. Advising the plaintiffs that their remedy lay in the ballot box, not the courts, the district court thus dismissed the entire case.

II

On appeal, the plaintiffs have urged that the district court erred when it held that there was a rational basis for singling out the Chicago public school employees for less generous employment rights than their suburban or downstate counterparts; that strict scrutiny should be applied to the legislation both because it was passed in retaliation for the CTU's political opposition to Republican candidates and because it was intentionally crafted to have a disparate impact on African American and other minority employees; that the State defendants were not immune under the Eleventh Amendment; that the district court should not have abstained in Hearne's individual case; and that the court erred in finding that Daley's, Hoffman's, and the CTU's claims were not ripe for decision. We take up these points in turn.

A. Rational Basis for Chicago-Only Legislation

The plaintiffs concede that the proper test under the Equal Protection Clause for their geographical discrimination argument is whether the legislature had a rational basis for...