California court strikes down teacher tenure rules in major ruling. Los Angeles — A Los Angeles County Superior Court judge struck down five key California rules affecting the hiring and firing of teachers Tuesday, agreeing with plaintiffs that they made it too difficult to remove ineffective teachers from public school classrooms and that children’s education suffered as a result.
If upheld, legal and education analysts say, the decision will reverberate throughout the nation’s education establishment. Judge Rolf Treu found in Vergara v. California, a case brought by students with the support of education reform advocates and a high-power law firm, that the rules governing tenure and other teachers’ protections violated the state constitution, disproportionately affecting black and Hispanic students and cheating them of a basic education.
Vergara v. California: The court’s decision to gut teacher tenure will not improve poor schools. Courtesy of Shutterstock On Tuesday, a California court struck down state teacher tenure and seniority protections as a violation of the rights of poor and minority students to an equal education.
The decision, which will make it easier to fire bad teachers, who are disproportionately found in high-poverty schools, is being hailed as a great triumph for civil rights. Bruce Reed, president of the Broad Foundation and a former Democratic staffer, suggested the ruling was “another big victory” for students of color, in the tradition of Brown v. Board of Education. Judge strikes down California’s teacher tenure laws: A made-up statistic helped him reach the decision. GuidoVrola / iStock This week Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Rolf Treu handed the education reform movement a stunning legal victory, when he struck down California’s teacher tenure laws for discriminating against poor and minority students.
The statutes made it so onerous to fire bad teachers, he wrote, that they all but guaranteed needy kids would be stuck in classrooms with incompetent instructors—rendering the laws unconstitutional.