California lawsuits target teachers’ union work rules.
By Larry Sand
(From City Journal, June 6th, 2012)
When politics fails, reformers turn to the courts. California’s Democrat-controlled state legislature has resisted reforms that threaten teacher-union power. Now two class-action lawsuits could undo the state’s longstanding seniority and tenure rules. On Tuesday, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge heard arguments from attorneys representing six families who say the nation’s second-largest school district has ignored the 40-year-old Stull Act, which requires the use of student performance in teacher evaluations. If successful, the lawsuit, filed last November, would require every school district in the Golden State to establish its own method of evaluating teachers—but all would need to use evidence of student learning based on standardized tests, just as 23 other states currently do.
A second lawsuit, filed last month on behalf of eight students from around the state, claims provisions of California’s education code—rigid tenure rules, a seniority-based firing system that ignores teacher quality, and a “due-process” system that makes it all but impossible to remove incompetent or criminal teachers—violate student rights. “As a result of these arbitrary distinctions” in hiring and firing, the complaint reads, “children of substantially equal age, aptitude, motivation, and ability do not have substantially equal access to education. Because education is a fundamental interest under the California Constitution, the statutes that dictate this unequal, arbitrary result violate the equal protection provisions of the California Constitution.”
Students Matter, a nonprofit founded by Silicon Valley entrepreneur David Welch, filed the second lawsuit. The student plaintiffs attend school in four districts, though the complaint targets only two—Los Angeles Unified and Alum Rock Elementary Unified in San Jose. Other named defendants include California governor Jerry Brown, Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson, the state of California, the state board of education, and the state department of education. Students Matter is determined to ensure “that the policies embodied in the California Code of Education place the interests of students first and promote the goal of having an effective teacher in every classroom.” To that end, the group has joined forces with some heavy hitters in the education-reform world, including Michelle Rhee’s Students First, Democrats for Education Reform, Parent Revolution, and the New Schools Venture Fund. The lead lawyers handling the case are Ted Boutrous (from law giant Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher) and Ted Olsen, U.S. solicitor general under George W. Bush.
The Students Matter lawsuit doesn’t ask the court to devise specific policy solutions. Ultimately, those decisions should be left to local districts—as they are in 33 other states. Currently, California schools don’t take teacher effectiveness into account when making layoff decisions. The newest hires are the first to go, and senior teachers have their pick of schools. Struggling inner-city schools end up suffering the most, as the lawsuit states: “One recent study showed that a school in the highest poverty quartile is 65 percent more likely to have a teacher laid off than a school in the lowest poverty quartile. As a result of seniority-based layoffs, the highest poverty schools in California are likely to lose 30 percent more teachers than wealthier schools. The disproportionate number of vacancies in those schools are then filled by transferring lower performing teachers, including grossly ineffective teachers, from other schools.”
Last year, Los Angeles Superior Court judge William Highberger ruled that “last in/first out” imposes a disparate impact on schools in high-poverty neighborhoods. Highberger’s decision in Reed v. California, which the ACLU litigated, exempted 45 schools from layoffs (and had the unintended effect of exacerbating layoffs in other Los Angeles schools). The Reed case may not have been the “landmark decision” some reformers claimed or hoped, but it set a precedent.