Nine California students challenge teacher employment benefits in court
Details of the case
On Jan. 27, nine public school students from California filed a lawsuit against the state of California. They claim that the tenure system established by California law violates the state constitution, which states that every child has the right to quality education.
The case, called Vergara v. California, focuses on rules allowing teacher tenure, or the offer of permanent employment after two years, and seniority, or the way schools prioritize more senior teachers during layoffs. The plaintiffs argue that these rules violate the California Constitution and the right to equal education.
The plaintiffs are nine students at public schools in California, including Beatriz Vergara, a 15-year-old. They are backed by the nonprofit Students Matter, which was created by businessman David Welch. The defendants are the state of California and two teacher unions, the California Federation of Teachers (CFT) and the California Teachers Association (CTA).
On firing teachers
Creating policy on firing teachers is a balancing act between protecting teachers and protecting students from ineffective teachers. John Deasy, the superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) and one of the witnesses for the plaintiffs, testified that it can take years and $250,000 to $450,000 to fire a teacher.
The plaintiffs argue that students suffer through classes with ineffective teachers because of the time it takes to fire them. They also argue that poor teachers are often transferred to low-income, poor-performing schools in an effort to get them to quit. They note that, as these schools often have high minority populations, those students suffer the most.
AP Psychology teacher Carlo Corti, who serves as the bargaining chair for the San Mateo Union High School District Teachers Association (SMUHSDTA), blames poor administrators, not the tenure system, saying, “I think that [trying to find ways around firing a teacher] is a sign of an inefficient school district. If there is a bad teacher, fire them. There is a process … If a teacher is detrimental to students … there are ways to terminate them, and school districts should use those.”
Supporters of the tenure system argue that it provides teachers with due process, an important legal right. Special education teacher Kirt Peterson, who also serves as the vice president of SMUHSDTA, says, “[It] means if we are accused of doing something wrong, we cannot be [told], ‘You did something wrong. You’re fired.’ There has to be evidence against us, and the lawsuit is hoping to remove that idea.”
Tenure also protects teachers’ freedom of speech. Corti says, “A school board member or an administrator can’t come to me and say, ‘We disagree with what you said, so you’re fired.’ That protection is really important.”
On the other hand, some students and parents say that tenure prevents their opinions of teachers from being heard. Junior David Diba says, “I’ve had one bad teacher at Aragon … We [my family] never felt able to complain. With the tenure rule, [we thought] our complaints wouldn’t have any effect.”
In response, assistant principal Jim Coe says, “I would hope that would never be something that would be ignored … [However,] unless people come forward and talk to us and tell us this is what’s going on, … you don’t have an opportunity to know … Here at Aragon, you are dealing with a staff of 80 people. There are three of us, so your ability to get to all the teachers in a timely manner and give them feedback, good or bad, is limited by just the sheer number of people that you have to deal with.”
When to offer tenure
The plaintiffs also claim that, because a teacher is offered a permanent teaching position after two years, ineffective teachers can be offered tenure. They say that because tenure is offered so early in a teacher’s career, it is difficult to gauge how effective the teacher will be in the coming years.
Coe says, “I think [the current time it takes to obtain tenure] is a little too soon. I would like to see a minimum of five years, if not seven, to really take a strong look. I don’t think a [new] teacher really understands what teaching is all about, and it takes about seven years to do that.”
On the other hand, according to the National Commission on Teaching and America’s future, one-third of all new teachers leave after three years and 46 percent leave after five years. Corti says, “Most teachers who quit quit soon. They quit in their first or second year. So I think there are a lot of teachers who end up in the profession, and then either because they moved to a different district or because they just decide teaching isn’t for them, they don’t get [tenure].”
People also disagree on what standards a teacher needs to meet in order to gain tenure. Coe says, “I think there has to be a much more rigorous set of criteria that teachers need to meet in order to achieve tenure, rather than doing an acceptable job where there are no negatives … All the types of things that you would like to see your best teachers doing … Increase the time that it takes, and also increase the level of the quality of the work that is being done in the classroom.”
Seniority in layoffs
One rule that the plaintiffs dislike is the “last in, first out” rule, which says that in the event of layoffs, it is the newest teachers who are fired. Vergara argues that this causes new, possibly more effective teachers to be fired simply because they are new, instead of basing it on other factors. Because new teachers in any given district start out in poorer schools that often have large minority populations, when there are layoffs, those schools and their students suffer the most. This is because these firings increase turnover, which many see as inherently harmful to the educational process.
Diba argues that while time spent teaching should translate into better teaching, that isn’t always the case. “If a teacher has seniority, they should be the best due to experience. [But] if a new teacher is amazing, they should be kept and if an old teacher is bad, they should be fired,” he says.
Corti thinks the best way to avoid the issue of deciding which teachers to fire during layoffs is to not need to lay off those teachers at all. “The ‘last in, first out’ mentality, the way you solve it is by funding education. The way you solve it is by making sure we can afford the teachers we have, not by changing that particular policy,” he says.
Tenure alternatives
There are many proposed alternatives to tenure, including adopting a merit pay system and making tenure less common.
Merit pay is when teachers are paid based on a number of factors, usually student performance and class participation. However, an issue that arises when discussing merit pay is how to accurately rate teachers.
Opponents of merit pay say it is difficult to have an unbiased ranking of teachers, as student test scores give an incomplete picture of testing abilities and human evaluators will always be biased. According to Corti, if students are to act as evaluators, strict but otherwise effective teachers could be unfairly evaluated, and thus not receive the benefits they deserve.
Students have faith in their ability to act as fair evaluators and argue that their opinions should be included. Sophomore Alton Olson says, “[We should be] ranking them based on feedback from the students, like poll the students and see which teachers are doing best in which areas.”
Opponents of merit pay also take issue with the idea of determining teacher salaries based on student test scores. Peterson says, “For myself, a special educator, does that mean I get paid [less] because my students test the poorest? That’s not fair.”
Referring to the tenure system, Corti concludes, “It’s like the old Churchill democracy quote: ‘It’s the worst form of government, except for everything else.’ So people may not like this, but I think they would really dislike the alternatives when they are presented to them.”
