A three-person court late on Thursday ruled in favor California’s teacher-tenure system, in a closely watched case that has broad national implications.
In the case of Vergara v. California, a state appeals court upheld as constitutional various provisions of California’s Education Code. In May 2012, nine public school students sued the state, claiming teacher employment statutes related to tenure were unconstitutional and they violated the equal protection rights of minority and low-income students under the California Constitution.
Link: Read The Opinion
A lower court in Los Angeles in 2014 agreed with the students, but the new ruling overturns that decision.
“Plaintiffs failed to establish that the challenged statutes violate equal protection, primarily because they did not show that the statutes inevitably cause a certain group of students to receive an education inferior to the education received by other students,” the appellate judges said.
The court also said that school official, and not legislatures, need to work to ensure that educational quality applied to all public-school students.
Related Video: Was the Vergara teacher-retention case wrongly decided?
“Administrators—not the statutes—ultimately determine where teachers within a district are assigned to teach. Critically, plaintiffs failed to show that the statutes themselves make any certain group of students more likely to be taught by ineffective teachers than any other group of students,” the court said.
Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., a prominent lawyer representing the students, called the ruling a “temporary setback.”
“The Court of Appeal’s decision mistakenly blames local school districts for the egregious constitutional violations students are suffering each and every day, but the mountain of evidence we put on at trial proved — beyond any reasonable dispute — that the irrational, arbitrary, and abominable laws at issue in this case shackle school districts and impose severe and irreparable harm on students,” he said in a statement.
"I think it’s a win certainly for educators, but also a win for students,” California Teachers Assn. President Eric C. Heins said after the decision. “The trial never made the connection between the harms [the plaintiffs] were alleging and the statutes they were challenging. I think the laws have been working.”
The appeals court agreed that “the evidence also revealed deplorable staffing decisions being made by some local administrators that have a deleterious impact on poor and minority students in California’s public schools.” But the judges said that since the students’ legal team attacked the statutes and not the actions of the administrators, “this was a heavy burden and one plaintiffs did not carry.”
The California students found fault with three items:
- A permanent employment statute, which grants tenure to new teachers after two years; but requires a decision on tenure earlier into their employment;
- Several dismissal statutes, which afford teachers certain due process rights before being subject to termination (such as investigations, hearings, union grievances, administrative appeals); and
- A “last-in, first out” statute, which mandates a seniority-based layoff system requiring that layoffs be conducted by seniority status—so recently-hired teachers are dismissed first, regardless of performance.
The students backed their claims with statistics: according to the U.S. Department of Education, California public schools ranked 46th in the nation in 4th-grade reading and 47th in the nation in 8th-grade math.
California defended against the lawsuit, supported by two California teachers’ unions representing over 400,000 teachers. They argued the statutes, which strengthened the employment rights of public school teachers and enhanced the status of the teaching profession, were not the real cause of California’s failing schools. The lawsuit distracted from the real issue: the need for smaller classrooms and adequate resources to improve public education. Not only were the statutes constitutional, California argued, but they also protected the important constitutional due process rights of teachers as public employees.
In August 2014, however, the trial judge sided with the students. The court found that “substantial evidence” showed the statutes imposed a real and appreciable impact on students’ fundamental right to equality of education, and imposed a disproportionate burden on poor and minority students. California appealed the judgment.
The Deputy Attorney General for California emphasized during oral argument there was insufficient causation to prove the plaintiffs’ equal protection claims. If school districts were assigning a disproportionate share of poor teachers to low-income students, this was not actually caused by the statutes, but resulted from the independent decisions made by the district themselves.
Boutros, the students’ attorney, countered that even if the statutes don’t spell out their harmful effects, the court must look to their practical effects—and the trial court heard overwhelming evidence of their harmful, negative effects on the students’ fundamental right to education.
The case will be appealed to the state's Supreme Court.
