CHICAGO – A federal appeals court reversed a lower court’s decision to reject a class action lawsuit filed by members of the Chicago Teachers Union over 2012 school closings that allegedly discriminated against black teachers.

“It is both dramatic and disturbing that highly qualified teachers and paraprofessionals who are essential lifelines to neighborhood schools are being displaced, with a disparate impact on African-American educators,” CTU President Karen Lewis said in a prepared statement.

“For more than five years we have asked CPS to stop these discriminatory school actions, and instead, to work with the CTU and our community and parent allies to create robust and well-funded neighborhood schools.”

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The U.S. Court of Appeals earlier this month approved class action status in favor of the CTU and members Donald Garrett, Robert Green and Vivonell Brown Jr., who represent 213 CTU members who were fired as part of Chicago Public Schools’ efforts to improve the city’s long failing schools.

The CTU’s lawsuit argues that CPS officials targeted schools with higher proportions of black teachers for turnaround, which involves terminating employees. The union alleges a pattern of racially motivated school decisions by CPS officials that also extends to school closures in recent years.

“Since 2004, the Chicago Board of Education has turned around 33 schools. More than 52 percent of the tenured teachers terminated in the 2012 turnarounds were African-American, although African-Americans made up less than 27 percent of the CPS tenured teaching staff and 44 percent of the tenured teacher population in other schools meeting criteria for turnaround,” according to the CTU statement.

“The court noted that, ‘No schools were selected for turnaround on the North Side, where only 6.5 percent of tenured teachers are African-American.”

Progress Illinois reports the Court of Appeals ruling reverses a U.S. District Court judge’s decision last year to deny class action certification in the case.

This week, “CTU representatives will appear before that lower court judge to ‘request entry of an order certifying the class status’ aw well as ‘seek turnaround data from 2002 through the present,’” according to the news site.

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In the recent reversal, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit considered how the CTU’s case compares to the argument for class action status in Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes from 2011.

“The Seventh Circuit … emphasized the fact that there was one decision-making boy that was ‘of one mind, using one process’” in the CTU case,” WorkplaceClassAction.com reports. “It distinguishes this situation from Wal-Mart, where there were ‘myriad actions of individual managers.’

“It concluded that ‘(d)ecisions by myriad low-level managers are different than decisions made by … few concentrated top-level managers,’ and thus that certification of claims based on third stage of the decision-making process was appropriate,” according to the site.

The CTU points out the case is one of two federal lawsuits filed by the union over teacher and employee layoffs.

“In a separate federal lawsuit, Judge Milton Irving Shadur certified a class of 763 African-American teachers and staff laid off by the Board in 2011,” according to the CTU statement. “These layoffs targeted schools in the African-American community to solve an alleged budget crisis.

“Since 2011, Mayor (Rahm) Emanuel and his handpicked Board of Education have suspended the careers of close to 5,000 certified teachers and 3,000 educational support personnel, and closed and turned around nearly 80 schools. This divestment is centered on the city’s South and West sides, disproportionately impacting students, communities and staff of color.”