Educational Malpractice

Beginning in the 1970s, parents sought to render school boards, teachers, and other educational staff members liable for the inability of their children to perform well in school, charging a variety of school officials with educational malpractice in disputes over pedagogical methods and student outcomes. Plaintiffs have tried unsuccessfully to rely on the concept of malpractice, a term used to refer to negligence by professionals, such as doctors and lawyers who fail to meet their duties to clients and cause them harm.

To date, all efforts to establish educational malpractice as a tort in regular educational settings have been fruitless insofar as it is “a tort theory beloved of commentators, but not of courts” (Ross v. Creighton University, 1990, p. 1327). Among the reasons why the ...