The VergarGuments are Coming to New York State!
Posted on July 4, 2014
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And so it goes… The VergarGuments keep-a-comin… spreading their way from California to the Empire State, from Albany to Buffalo. And what are VergarGuments you say?
Well, a VergarGument is a fallacious form of legal reasoning applied in the context of state constitutional litigation over causes of inequities and inadequacies of schooling selectively suffered by disadvantaged children. Yeah… that’s a mouthful, but it is worthy of its own newly minted, excessively precise definition.
The VerGargument arises from the recent Vergara case in California where a sufficiently gullible (or politically predisposed – you be the judge) judge accepted whole hog, the assertion that state laws governing the assignment and dismissal of teachers under district contractual agreementscaused that state’s most disadvantaged children to be disproportionately subjected to “grossly ineffective” teachers.
You see, “causation” is a pretty important part of such legal challenges. And here, the burden on those bringing the case against the statutes in question was to show (reasonably/sufficiently display a connection… not “prove” beyond any reasonable doubt… and also not quite the same as statistical causation) that those statutes are responsible for the selective mistreatment of those bringing the case to court (deprivation of their state constitutionally guaranteed rights) . As I explained in my previous post, the causation assertion is suspect on simple logical grounds, with little need to get into the weeds of the statistical analyses.
The assertion that state policy restrictions on local contractual agreements is a primary (or even a significant) cause of teaching inequity is problematic at many levels.
First, variation in access to teacher quality across schools within districts varies… across districts. Some districts (in California or elsewhere) achieve reasonably equitable distributions of teachers while others do not. If state laws were the cause, these effects would be more uniform across districts – since they all have to deal with the same state statutory constraints (perhaps those The VergarGuments are Coming to New York State! | School Finance 101: