Have teachers unions become instruments of injustice? One judge in California thinks the answer is ’yes’
In a ruling that has already sent shockwaves through public education, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Rolf Treu found in Vergara v. California that five California laws governing the hiring, firing and laying off of teachers – laws that teachers unions favor – violated the California Constitution’s equal protection clause, and should be struck...
In a ruling that has already sent shockwaves through public education, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Rolf Treu found in Vergara v. California that five California laws governing the hiring, firing and laying off of teachers – laws that teachers unions favor – violated the California Constitution’s equal protection clause, and should be struck down.
In an opinion that set out his factual and legal conclusions, Judge Treu found that the combined effect of those laws was to prevent the firing of clearly incompetent teachers and that those teachers tend to settle in schools that serve poor families.
Treu concluded that having so many awful teachers serving disadvantaged students was a violation of equal protection under the law: The state, having committed itself to providing public schools, was obligated to provide decent schools staffed by decent teachers. The combination of easy tenure, a byzantine process for firing and a “last-in-first-out” rule for layoffs that ignored teacher quality led to anywhere from 2,750 to 8,250 awful teachers (by Treu’s calculations) being foisted upon poor Californians. This was clearly unfair to the students who lose the equivalent of a year’s worth of education (it is estimated that L.A. students taught by a teacher in the bottom 5 percent for quality lose 9.54 months of learning compared to students with an average teacher) because they come from the wrong neighborhood and wound up in the wrong classroom.
The connection to unions here is undeniable. The California Teachers Association (the state affiliate of the National Education Association) and the California Federation of Teachers (the state affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers) were allowed to intervene in the suit. Their interest in preserving the old rules was so deep that even though they weren’t originally sued, the court allowed them to join as defendants.
The teachers unions didn’t have to step in as they did, but their commitment to lowest-common-denominator unionism – protecting the right of the worst teachers to hold on to jobs for which they are plainly not suited – trumped any concerns they might have about the educations that poor Californians receive.
This was a trial court decision. It will be appealed, and because the reasoning was novel there is no guarantee it will hold up when this case gets to California’s highest court. It’s also worth noting that California isn’t alone in bending over backward to protect bad teachers.
This lawsuit started with nine families saying that for California to keep so many bad teachers on school district payrolls was fundamentally unfair. Because of this case’s success so far, we now know these families have a case. And even if the courts ultimately back away from Treu’s legal reasoning, there will at least be a debate about the fundamental morality of laws and union contracts that foist so many bad teachers on poor students. Whatever else happens, Judge Treu deserves credit for opening up that debate.
We can only hope that such a debate is sparked in Illinois. The concerns of Los Angeles families regarding the efficacy and morality of teacher tenure must ring true in the ears of Illinoisan parents. Scott Reeder, in his landmark 2007 piece quoted in the documentary “Waiting for ‘Superman,’” notes that, “During the past six years, 1 in 2,500 Illinois educators have lost their teaching credentials through suspension, revocation or surrender. By comparison, during the same period 1 in 57 doctors practicing in Illinois lost their medical licenses and 1 in 97 Illinois attorneys lost their law licenses.”
Parents in Illinois can and should hold their schools to the same standards as these brave Angelinos. Their case stands not only to improve outcomes for the state’s most vulnerable children, but also to shake the status quo in public education to its core.