ADVERSE EMPLOYMENT ACTIONS AND PUBLIC SCHOOL ...

4. What principles to guide the practice of school district level administrators can be
discerned from adverse employment actions against school administrators, in the years of 1981
to 2010?
Research Data Collection
West Education Law Digest provided a brief review of the 100 plus cases and findings
that were relevant to K-12 schools. Westlaw uses key numbers to classify certain themes within
topics such as “schools.” Westlaw then organizes case law based on the themes under each key
number. The court cases that were explicated came from the U.S. Supreme Court, the U.S.
District Court, the U.S. Courts of Appeal, and state courts. The cases were identified using the
following Westlaw descriptors: Schools 147.28--Principals. Copies of the cases were procured
using the Lexis Nexus legal search engine and the official case docket number.
The Case Brief Methodology
Case brief methodology set forth by Statsky and Wernet (1995) was used to brief and
analyze all cases. Simply put, a case brief is a systematic explication of a court’s opinion of a
given dispute. Statsky and Wernet (1995) defined two distinct functions of briefing a case. First,
the brief is meant to clarify to the reader the decision of the court. Secondly, the brief should
provide the reader with all essential information, making rereading the case unnecessary. The
following format was employed to explicate each case used in the study:
1. Citation--“a citation (also called a cite) is the identifying information that enables you
to find a law or other document in a law library” (Statsky & Wernet, 1995, p. 24).
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