Unhappy with the poor public education they were receiving, nine California public school students joined forces to sue the state of California. They claimed that certain laws on the books in California were unconstitutional, because the result of those laws was, according to them, a deprivation of their rights to equal protection under the California constitution. They said that as a result of these laws, the quality of their education suffered.
Specifically, they complained:
[ul]
[li]California’s Permanent Employment Statute (or “Tenure Law”) - requires teachers be granted tenure after 18 months – the students contend that is too soon to judge a teacher’s ability[/li][li]Job retention statutes - make it so difficult to fire poor teachers, they said, that it impairs a school district’s ability to cull poor teachers and creates poor learning environments[/li][li]Seniority rules – when laying off teachers, California law requires that only seniority, as opposed to effectiveness, be considered - again the students claims that this, in interaction with the other laws, eviscerated their chances at quality education[/li][/ul]
Alarmed at the prospect of some or all of these laws being scuttled, California’s two largest teachers’ unions, the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers, joined the suit as intervenor defendants.
The trial court issued its preliminary opinion today.
What that appears to mean is that the Court has enjoined the state from enforcing those laws.
And it appears to mean that the teachers’ unions in California have been dealt a defeat.
Will this survive appeal? Will there be a political response – that is, a rewriting of the problematic laws? Or will an appeal erase the ruling from having any need to react in the legislature?
I don’t know anything about the legality of any of this.
But as to which side I’m rooting for here, I’m kind of torn. On the one hand I’d like to see the teachers unions get smacked down. OTOH, I’m very uncomfortable with “equal protection” being used to micromanage the way governments runs things.
We have no such laws that I am aware of here in Michigan. However, union contracts being what they are, there are often similar (if not perhaps a little less tenuous) provisions based in their contracts.
I think having them enshrined in law is a little bit crazy, even though I generally support the right of teachers to organize.
I’m not crazy about the idea of seniority rights, and I could see moving tenure back from 18 months, and I don’t know how difficult it is to fire teachers (although in other cases, e.g., NY’s rubber rooms, it’s really seemed that the real problem was lazy incompetent administration who couldn’t figure out how to schedule hearings in a timely fashion, and teacher’s unions only got blamed because they’re the favorite whipping boy of the Republican Party).
But suggesting that these are the real reasons why schools are failing is…misguided. It’s like looking at the high level of heart disease among folks in poverty and blaming the epidemic on their doctors.
If they want to file a reasonable lawsuit, I’d suggest aiming it at policies that contribute to poverty and high crime in low-income neighborhoods. But I have a sneaking suspicion that whoever paid the attorneys for the lawsuit might just be a major donor to a group that rhymes with Bebubican Barty.
The CTA in California is one of the most powerful unions in the state. Along with the prison guards and SCIU, they pretty much control the legislature. True story - I know a teacher who gets laid off at the end of every single year and gets rehired the next year. I’m not sure why that happens but I suspect it’s to avoid giving tenure.
I support teachers generally, but CTA can suck donkey nuts. Any time they lose anything it’s a victory.
California trial judges are sometimes highly political appointees. It will be interesting to read the opinion and see if the appellate court upholds it. The ruling as described is very broad, and would seem to ascribe amazing powers of corruption to the tenure clause alone, and completely eviscerates the powers of the local school board to enter into traditional California teaching arrangements.
The California Appellate Court is not adverse to giving Superior Court judges (trial level judges) some amazingly erudite smack downs when they overreach. I give you the unpublished decision in In re Marriage of Papazian Not Reported in Cal.Rptr.3d, 2012 WL 1722578 Cal.App. 1 Dist., 2012
May 16, 2012. The appellate court criticized and removed the lower court judge. My family has known the families of the litigating families for 40 to 75 years depending on which side. Let’s just say the trial judge agreed not to consider the family wealth of one of the 1 percent in setting child support due to the wife. The 1 percent status in this instance was very much earned, and I have no criticism of either litigant, both of whom I know.
I read the ruling (at least I think this is the ruling). It’s not the final ruling, so we’ll have to wait and see, but…
I find the legal analysis of most of this to be bizarre, but I just skimmed it, so maybe I missed something. I don’t really see a link between the statutes and the EP violation. But this isn’t the full ruling, so maybe the final ruling will have more detail. I don’t know that I can say anything really concrete until the full ruling comes out.
However, while I agree with the idea that the state has to provide a basic level of education to students and that it has to do so in a way that doesn’t violate EP, that doesn’t mean that the state has to choose an optimum path to do so. If, for example, the state can provide teacher tenure while still meeting some basic criteria for education and meeting EP standards, then I don’t really see anything to stop it from doing so under the California Constitution.
If anyone’s interested, David Atkins has a post up with his thoughts on the case. That post links to other posts about the backers of the case and other posts with more detail about the issues involved. I haven’t read these either, so I can’t comment on their veracity.
I read your links. That tentative decision is an embarrassment to the California bench, for the reasons you stated and more. The students do not yet seem to be in any position to claim to be in a “strict scrutiny” class, which, according to recent USSC decisions, may not even apply to black people anymore now that race is “a-okay” in the USA. (Which is a separate load of shit.) The current factual basis for the judge’s ruling consists of an expert opining that 1 to 3 percent of teachers are ineffective, without noting that is pretty damn near perfect and making the perfect the enemy of the good. Are we really going to get the number below 1 percent? I think not. Next, the opinion does not explain the foundation of the expert’s opinion and why it applies to the Plaintiffs and whether the students have only part of their day with the 1 to 3 out of a 100 ineffective teachers, or the whole day all year.
The procedure in California is to issue a tentative decision and then have the party that won come up with the rationale and factual record supporting the decision. If the trial started in January and this was issued today (which it was), this is a piss poor tentative decision. I can’t imagine that the Plaintiffs’ lawyers are very happy with it. Both sides will offer better language for the judge to plagiarize in his final decision.
Both sides probably also have submitted a request for statement of decision to the judge asking that he rule on various factual issues on how he weighed the evidence. There is no reference to such here. Maybe it was not requested, but I’d damn well want one in this case.
I also seem to recall from my con law classes from the last century that the remedy, even in a strict scrutiny case, must be narrowly tailored to wrong. I see no effort here to connect the lousy 1 to 3 percent to the ineffective educational result claimed for these Plaintiffs. But we shall see I suppose.
And if this had gone against conservatives, they’d have screamed “activist judge”. Are conservatives really okay with unelected judges making these sorts of decisions based on…unorthodox…interpretations?
Minimum wage laws. Affordable housing laws. Drug laws that have resulted in huge numbers of impoverished men being in prison.
In short, look at societies in which there’s much more wealth equality–and by purest coincidence more equal education outcomes–and look to see what they’re doing right.
I know, I know, that’s communist talk and totally off the table. But as long as we deny that growing up in poverty is the single greatest predictor of educational outcome, as long as we act as though it’s all the fault of bad teachers and has nothing to do with our public policy that tolerates insane levels of poverty, we’re gonna keep seeing the same results.
As it is currently written the Court of Appeal will certainly reverse and remand for new trial. Maybe with a new judge. This judge is clearly out of his/her depth. However, this is a tentative decision. The Plaintiffs would be very lapse in not offering the judge a much better draft to plagiarize/adopt. The tentative decision is a hot mess.
I don’t believe that you could establish a causation nexus, in the legal world as it exists today, between the minimum wage laws and equal protection under either the California or federal constitutions. Same goes for affordable housing laws. Drug laws might be a target, but only to reform sentencing disparity between racial groups.
What you said earlier about strict scrutiny is in my opinion a problem in this decision – but not remotely for the reason you identified. It’s untrue that strict scrutiny is no longer applied to racial classifications.
I’m gathering that you agree that in this case the nexus between the “tenure clauses” and “equal protection” would be equally difficult to establish.
The effect of Shelby v. Holder is that legislatures (and other elected bodies such as school boards) no longer determine what is necessary on a factual basis to protect the rights the poor and ethnic groups. Shelby is firm precedent for courts determining on their own personal observations not amounting to judicial notice even, but basically personal conviction, not evidence, what is and is not a protection. Congress has determined continually since 1964 that such measures were necessary and necessary to continue. Congress need not have renewed the provisions and could have let them expire. Vergara is similar in that it substitutes the views of a judge that no teacher may have the tenure protections that most California districts have had for almost a century (New Jersey had the first tenure law in 1909).
Textualist/original intent jurisprudence is not a philosophy of law, it is window dressing for the exercise of political power. In Shelby it is to allow the racist rebel states to suddenly demand voter id for non-existent voter fraud for the purpose of disenfranchising voters of color to suppress Democratic Party voting blocs and give Republican voting blocs an advantage, and Vegara, in the name of rooting out a speculatively evil 1 to 3 percent of “bad teachers” puts the other 99 to 97 percent in line to be capriciously fired, because civil service type proceedings for job discharge are expensive, as all due process rights are.
The fact of the matter is that justice administered with standards and based on the merits has always been and will always be expensive, but in the long run due process and the rule of law have been beneficial to the vast majority of humankind. Admittedly it has reduced the powers of monarchs, oligarchs and fascists, but that was the whole point.
I don’t know how I feel about this avenue for removing it but I’m all for getting rid of tenure. Nobody should be guaranteed a job just for lasting 18 months.
Race seems to be a better predictor of test scores than income is- upper middle class Black students have lower test scores than working class white ones.
I agree it has little to do with teacher quality though.