California Decision Protects Teachers' Rights to Due Process

Lily Eskelsen Garcia 

Today is National Teacher Appreciation Day,
On Thursday, April 14,  the California Court of Appeal, in a unanimous decision, overturned the deeply-flawed lower court ruling in Vergara v. State of California issued in 2014, which held that laws governing so-called teacher “tenure” were unconstitutional.

“Today was a win for our educators, our schools and most importantly, our students,” NEA President Lily Eskelsen García said responding to the ruling. “Now we must return to working on real solutions to ensure all of our students succeed. Only when teachers, school boards, and administrators work together can we ensure that there is a great public school for every student.”

While the decision was good news for educators, said California Teachers Association President Eric C. Heins, it was a huge win for students.

“Today’s ruling reversing Judge Rolf Treu’s decision overwhelmingly underscores that the laws under attack have been good for public education and for kids,” said Heins. “Stripping teachers of their ability to stand up for their students and robbing school districts of the tools they need to make sound employment decisions was a wrong-headed scheme developed by people with no education expertise and the appellate court justices saw that.”

SEE ALSO:

Top 5 Myths and Lies About Teachers and Their Profession
What Teacher ‘Tenure’ is – And What It’s Not
Why Are Teachers Being Asked to Swap Due Process for a Pay Raise?
Why Due Process is Vitally Important to the Teaching Profession

In February, the attorneys representing 400,000 California educators appeared before the panel in the California Court of Appeal to urge the justices to overturn Judge True’s meritless decision. They argued that the foundation of his ruling – that due process protections were deterrents to good teachers being hired in high poverty schools — was clearly unsupported by the facts. Emerging from the courthouse confident that the appeal would be successful,  attorney Michael Rubin told reporters afterward that “there is no evidence—zero—that these statutes are the cause of any constitutional violation.”

The appeals court agreed.  “Plaintiffs failed to establish that the challenged statutes violate equal protection,”  Justice Roger Boren wrote, “primarily because they did not show that the statutes inevitably cause a certain group of students to receive an education inferior to the education received by other students.”

Vergara v. State of California was filed in May 2012 by a group called Students Matter on behalf of nine California students. But the lawsuit never had anything to do with what is best for students. It was manufactured by a David Welch, a Silicon Valley millionaire and founder of Students Matter, to silence the voices of educators by stripping their due process to make it easier to push a corporate education “reform” agenda.

Although the plaintiffs have already announced they will appeal, review by the California Supreme Court of today’s unanimous and decisive ruling is unlikely. Still, challenges to due process are not going away. On the same day the Vergara decision was handed down, a lawsuit was filed in Minnesota which, like Vergara, is sponsored by a well-funded reform group and also argues that the state’s due process laws violate the state’s constitutional guarantee to a “thorough and efficient” education.

Educators across the country know that these lawsuits do absolutely nothing to help students and take much-needed attention away from the real work of ensuring that every student has a great teacher.

“Striking down teachers’ due process rights will not help our most at-risk students,” said Eskelsen García. “High-poverty districts do not suffer from too few teachers being removed; they suffer from too much teacher turnover. Every student deserves a highly effective teacher in his or her classroom and we must do what we can to attract and retain the best.”