Eight Problems with the Vergara Lawsuit
JANUARY 27, 2014
Here’s a quick review of why I think Vergara et. al. v. California is a deeply flawed lawsuit and should be rejected at trial (beginning today). I’ve written about the case before, based on a presentation by the plaintiffs at the Stanford Law School. That prior post had a bit more in the way of citations and links, so if you want to deeper, give it a read.1. Plaintiffs misunderstand the challenges facing California public schools. Our state’s spending on education is dismal – nearly the worst in the nation. Our students have disturbingly little access to nurses, libraries, librarians, and counselors, and our student-to-staff ratios are also rather high for both teaching and administrative staff. The measures used to argue school failure are also more apt to show the effects of poverty and language acquisition – and we are a state with high percentages of children living in poverty, and learning English as a new language. Even a key witness for the plaintiffs, Erik Hanushek, is among a group of researchers who have demonstrated that school and teacher effects are relatively small (15-20%) when analyzing test performance. If there are problems in California public schools that rise to the level requiring a constitutional challenge, those problems are not caused by ed. code provisions relating to teacher hiring, layoffs, and employment status.
2. Plaintiffs rely inappropriately on standardized tests to identify problem schools and supposedly inferior teachers. Wealth is the number one predictor of relative performance on standardized tests. Here and around the world. Period. See the graph in this recent article for the latest example, taken from the PISA test. The use of test scores and val