A flagrantly incompetent teacher is giving an object lesson in chutzpah — by suing school officials for firing him when five years of counseling and coaching failed to improve his performance.
Jesus Estaba’s suit says his dismissal last month “is shocking to the conscience and one’s sense of fairness,” despite the fact that court papers include the damning decision that found him an “unsatisfactory teacher.”
Among the evidence that got the once-tenured, special-ed instructor canned was a 2012 science class where he told third-graders to cut and paste pictures so they could learn about liquids.
That assignment was deemed “at best a pre-kindergarten to kindergarten activity,” and Estaba was further faulted for letting many of the underage kids use images of beer for the purported education.
At other times, Estaba failed to correct students who gave wrong answers, called one kid “too learning disabled” to teach and skipped over lessons in subtraction because “addition was easier for the students,” the Education Department found.
Estaba, 59, also displayed his own poor language skills during his disciplinary hearing when he said: “The lesson went good because the students were active participating.”
Outraged parents involved in a pending suit to overturn the city’s teacher-tenure system said Estaba’s case proves their point.
“This teacher was in the classroom for 23 years and allowed to destroy the lives of so many children,” said Mona Davids, whose two children are plaintiffs in the anti-tenure suit.
Estaba, who lives three blocks from Mayor de Blasio’s Park Slope home, declined to comment, but his lawyer, Brian McCaffrey, defended him as a “dedicated” educator who’s “creative and very intuitive.”
“This guy’s kids did well. It’s hard to get special-needs kids to improve,” McCaffrey said.
Estaba’s Manhattan Supreme Court suit seeks to have him reinstated to his job and to “expunge” any record of his discipline.
The city Law Department and Education Department both declined to comment.