When Raising Standards for Teachers Goes Wrong
A $1.8 billion discrimination lawsuit was filed 30 years ago. It’s still not over. What will be its legacy?
In the 1980s and 1990s, the most difficult teaching position to fill in New York City public schools was bilingual special education. Elsa Gulino was a perfect fit. Born in Puerto Rico, she held a bachelor’s degree in educational psychology and master’s in special education. She spoke four languages: English, Spanish, French, and Italian. Though she started as a school aide in 1970, she decided to become a licensed teacher because she wanted to help students become better citizens. In 1993, she was promoted to education evaluator, a specialized position that administers diagnostic tests to match children with special education services.
Three years later, her license was terminated when state education officials began enforcing a new series of licensing exams meant to raise standards for teachers. Instead of testing educators on the subject matter they would teach, the state imposed an expansive paper-and-pencil test of math, science, art, history, literature, and writing as a mandatory gatekeeper for every license. A kindergarten, high school physics, or bilingual special education teacher could have their conditional license terminated because they didn’t know the aesthetic purpose of the U.S. Air Force Academy chapel 1,783 miles away in Colorado—an actual question on the test.
Mrs. Gulino failed to pass the exams after many attempts.
The termination of her license slashed her salary by $10,000. It also displaced her to four different schools over the next four years when less experienced employees had the seniority rights to push her out. She retired in 2000—the only way to end the cycle—with a pension of $19,000 after working in the school system for 30 years.
Yet when she retired, something unexpected happened. Her supervisor asked her to return part-time. The request reinforced something Mrs. Gulino already knew: that the exam she failed said nothing about her competence as an educator.
What happened to Mrs. Gulino also happened to an entire cross section of teachers in New York City. Starting in 1994, a mass termination of teaching licenses began ripping through the city’s public schools. That spring, approximately 1,800 experienced educators had their licenses terminated, and thousands more over the next 18 years were prevented from earning permanent licenses because of the new licensing regime.
Hardest hit were Black and Latine teachers. Between 1993 and 2004, White teachers passed the exam at 93%, compared to 50% and 56% for Black and Latine teachers, respectively. By not passing the exam, educators who had worked successfully for 5 to 10 years—often under licenses to fill pervasive teaching shortages—lost jobs, wages, seniority, health insurance, and pension contributions. Many continued working the same positions but as demoted substitute teachers, a loss of $10,000 to $15,000 annually. Teachers on the cusp of middle-class stability fell into poverty. At least one teacher was forced into bankruptcy after losing his house to foreclosure.
In November 1996—thirty years ago this month—affected teachers filed a class action employment discrimination lawsuit against the state of New York and New York City. Gulino v. Board of Education was brought through the Center for Constitutional Rights alongside an activist teacher group named the Committee for a Fair Licensing Procedure, later called the Progressive Action Caucus. Approximately 5,000 Black and Latine teachers became certified class members seeking backpay, license reinstatement, and systemic reform to prevent the discrimination from happening to others.
In 2021—after 25 years of trials, appeals, and strategic delay by defendants—the court began distributing damages payments. The primary exam challenged, the Liberal Arts and Sciences Test, developed by the now-defunct National Evaluation Systems, was found at trial to be unrelated to the job of teaching. The exam was defective and discriminatory, something activists claimed in 1994 when the terminations started.
At present, the court has distributed 4,698 payments totaling a staggering $1.5 billion. Individual damages range from $2.3 million—a career’s worth of back wages, interest, and other fees—to $70, the cost of taking the exam. Ninety-six payments have gone to estates of teachers who died during the decades of delay, including the estate of Elsa Gulino, who died unexpectedly in 2003 not long after giving a nervous testimony in court. With $92 million paid to attorneys and monitors, Gulino is the largest financial judgment ever made against New York City. (New York state was dropped as a defendant during a 2006 appeal.)
I’ve spent the last six months speaking with dozens of teachers and activists involved in the Gulino case. I’ve studied the 3,500-page trial transcript that established the factual record. On the 30th anniversary of _Gulino_’s filing, I’ve been wrestling with what should be the legacy of the case and of teachers like Elsa Gulino.
An honest answer starts at the beginning.
The earliest licensure exams of this type were adopted as explicit tools of racial discrimination. In the 1940s, standardized licensing exams for teachers found little use in the Northeast where they were first developed, at Columbia University’s Teachers College in New York City. At the time, school district leaders preferred interviewing applicants over hiring them from a test score. But over the next decade, the exams found widespread adoption in the U.S. South to resist NAACP lawsuits challenging pay discrimination. Southern officials used exam scores to justify race-based pay scales already in place. The exams, weaponized as a broader strategy against integration, survived long after Brown, and were even written into state law in Florida between 1961 and 1965.
Today, states no longer use licensing exams as intentional tools of discrimination. In fact, many states prioritize creating a racially diverse teaching profession. But Gulino shows how discrimination through licensing still happens even without racist intent. As the Gulino saga unfolded, raising standards became the reason to dismiss viable alternatives to the discrimination exposed in plain sight. In 1995, the Committee for a Fair Licensing Procedure proposed exempting teachers such as Mrs. Gulino who had demonstrated competency through observations and other means. A year later, they proposed legislation toward similar ends by working with state senator David Paterson, who later became governor.
Education officials rejected each alternative under the guise of raising standards with the uniform licensing exam. “You can’t blame the thermometer for the temperature,” state education official Edith Hunsberger told the press in 2002 before the first Gulino trial. The point isn’t to have low standards for becoming a teacher. That’s a different kind of disaster, obviously. The point is not letting the language of standards and the false sense of objectivity in testing justify discrimination when it’s obvious and apparent.
The final payments to Gulino claimants are scheduled to finish in the next 12 months, ending the litigation after more than three decades. When this happens, the opportunity to learn from the legacy begins. The legacy lays bare how a tragedy like this happens and how it can be avoided: by public officials working with affected people when they propose solutions—rather than dismissing them outright, and never allowing an exam score far removed from the context of professional practice to negate more direct indicators of expertise. Given that yet another licensing exam used in 18 states was exposed as defective in 2021, learning from the Gulino legacy remains critical.
Even after the Gulino litigation ends, one outstanding debt will remain. As recently as 2023, New York City spokespersons have maintained the ruling was misguided, even unfair. To this tune, neither the city, state, nor test developers have ever acknowledged liability or issued a public apology to teachers—not even ones like Elsa Gulino who died before seeing themselves vindicated. Even after nearly $2 billion is paid out, the saga that bears Mrs. Gulino’s name will never truly be over for teachers and their families until this final debt is paid.