Nine California public school students are back in court again this month suing the state to abolish its laws on teacher tenure, seniority and other protections that the plaintiffs say keep bad educators in the classroom. It’s a symptom of a toxic environment that B.C. has a chance to avoid.
Over the first three weeks of the case, which began in January, the nine student plaintiffs, led nominally by sisters Beatriz and Elizabeth Vergara, have described chaotic classrooms with inattentive and hurtful teachers in their middle school.
It is the fifth time since the case was filed in 2012 that the defendants, the California Teachers’ Association and the California Federation of Teachers, have moved to have the case thrown out. They have been denied each previous time.
The lawsuit centres on five statutes written into the California education code that the students claim protect ineffective teachers, violating students’ right to a quality education.
The defendants in the case — the association, the federation and the state — are trying to show that school districts have other means to get rid of ineffective teachers.
In a trial that began in late January and was supposed to take 20 court days, plaintiffs in Vergara vs. California used the first 16 to put on their case. Superior Court Judge Rolf Treu heard from 22 witnesses.
As their first witness, the plaintiffs called Los Angeles Unified School District superintendent John Deasy, who testified about the difficulty of weeding out “grossly ineffective teachers” in the 18-month probationary period before they are granted tenure.
Under questioning by plaintiff’s attorney Marcellus McRae, Deasy said the district has struggled to dismiss tenured teachers when they turned out to be grossly ineffective. It was a long and expensive process.
“An average successful termination is one to two years,” he said. “But some cases have taken only slightly less than 10 years. “
Deasy said the cost to the school district for each dismissal ranges from $250,000 to $450,000. If misconduct is involved, it can cost even more, he said, because “you’re preparing a court case.”
While California has 275,000 teachers, under the current rules the state dismisses just 10 teachers a year for being ineffective in their jobs, he said.
But there’s more to this story.
It appears that the nine kids who brought the lawsuit are being backed and funded by a nonprofit called Students Matter. That group in turn was created by a successful tech entrepreneur named David Welch, who founded Students Matter in 2010 and hired the top-tier legal team.
Behind Students Matter is the Students First Foundation, which Welch created to fund the lawsuit and which has been a close collaborator.
For us in B.C., our own provincial government seems to prefer to continue to engage in endless litigation with the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation as the preferred alternative to nose-to-nose bargaining. But the longer that continues, the greater the chance that the California case could have unintended consequences, even for B.C. public education.
California suffers from a toxic polarization on educational issues that harms both students and the teaching profession, and while that has not happened here, the case might provide the opportunity for self-appointed “education reformers” to launch unproductive, divisive attacks on both the BCTF and individual teachers.
While most parents would prefer to seek real solutions to the challenge of ensuring an effective teacher in every classroom, “reformers” might portray unions as essentially dedicated to protecting “bad” teachers.
At the same time, teacher unions often view reformers, even government itself, as seeking to eliminate hard-earned contractual rights.
The lesson for both the BCTF and the provincial government here is that rather than see B.C.’s public-education system dragged into the same kind of ugly Californian morass that has resulted in the Vergara case, the perfect opportunity still exists, through principled bargaining, to identify convergent interests that would both satisfy government and benefit students and teachers.
Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.
