Judges weigh arguments over teacher vs. student rights in landmark tenure lawsuit
Most of the nine student plaintiffs in Vergara vs. California walk away from the 2nd District California Court of Appeal in Los Angeles after the first morning of oral arguments.
(Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times)overflow crowd at a Los Angeles appeals courtroom listened attentively Thursday to the latest round in an ongoing argument about the intersection of students’ rights and teachers’ rights.
“There probably isn’t anybody in this room who didn’t have a bad teacher sometime,” presiding justice Roger Boren remarked to the court — a point that may help explain why the case has drawn so much attention.
A judge’s 2014 ruling in the case, Vergara vs. California, holds that several key job protections for teachers are so harmful to students that they deprive children of their constitutional right to an education.
Lawyers representing the state of California and its powerful teachers unions on Thursday argued before a three-judge panel that the decision should be reversed and that the laws in question do not violate students’ rights.
The justices are reviewing the ruling of L.A. Superior Court Judge Rolf Treu that nullified the state’s system of awarding strong protections for teachers, including tenure, which takes effect at the end of their second year on the job.
These statutes, Treu concluded, make it almost impossible to fire a veteran, unionized teacher. The result, he wrote, is that bad teachers persist in the system, hurting students, especially black and Latino students and those from low-income families.
Treu’s decision would end tenure as well as the practice of “last-in, first-out,” which typically results in districts laying off less-experienced teachers during budget cuts — regardless of how well they do in their job.
And Treu also threw out rules that provide teachers a longer and more complex system to challenge dismissals.
First to take on Treu’s ruling was Deputy Attorney General Nimrod P. Elias. He said the trial judge erred in not balancing the benefits of state rules with any drawbacks caused by them.
Yes, there are bad teachers who have rights under California law that can prolong their time in front of students, he said. But these job protections also help the state attract and retain high-quality teachers, a benefit to students.
He argued that the current laws are being applied in a constitutional manner, without any discrimination.
This point brought the first question from one of the panelists, Associate Justice Brian M. Hoffstadt. Regardless of intent or wording, doesn’t “real-world impact” matter? If these statutes were harming students, could not a case be brought against them?
Elias conceded the point, but said that no rigid connection between the statutes and harm Vergara lawsuit, challenging teacher job protections, goes to appeals court - LA Times: