Gov Jerry Brown, Democrat of California, took a stand on Aug 29 for real students and real teachers and against a badly misinformed attack from plutocrats and corporate education reformers who think they know how to run public schools, CBS News reports.
Mr Brown has challenged the validity of the Vergara decision (a validity I still can’t figure out), which struck down teacher tenure, by appealing the case to a higher court. The ruling by Superior Court Judge Rulf Treu, finalized on Aug 28, said five teacher tenure laws were unconstitutional because they deprived the plaintiffs—a small group of minority students—of a quality education.
In his notice of appeal, Mr Brown said that under the state’s constitution, “the important issues presented in this case—if they are to have statewide legal impact—must be reviewed by a higher court, either the Court of Appeal or the Supreme Court of California.”
The formal legal grounds for the governor’s appeal seem to include the removal of any actual school district from the lawsuit before it went to trial. In other words, the court prevented school districts, which run the public schools, from being heard on the matter prior to the ruling. Yet the laws that are now unconstitutional carve out specific roles and duties for those excluded public school districts.
The court’s decision, therefore, Mr Brown said, “applies only to parties that have no role or duties under the challenged lawsuits.” That is, if public schools were excluded from the debate, the court’s ruling couldn’t have been objective and might force the legislature to pass possibly harmful laws for public schools.
While Mr Brown’s complaint certainly has a better legal standing than any other argument, a higher court will also have to consider the facts of the case, which are very much in error. During the trial, people wrote that giving teachers tenure made it more difficult for districts to fire bad teachers, even those who had molested children. That’s just not true: school districts have no problem firing bad teachers with tenure, provided an appropriate and due process has been followed.
Because of factual errors in the case and the issue that the ruling gave lawmakers absolutely no guidance as to how laws that pass constitutional muster might be constructed, California’s Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson asked for an appeal from the state’s attorney general. And Mr Brown came through.
On Aug 18, New York Times columnist Frank Bruni challenged the idea of teacher tenure by quoting a Colorado state senator, Mike Johnston, who was a Teach For America grad and a Harvard education master’s grad who taught for two years and then spent six years as a principal before running for the state senate.
“It provides no incentive for someone to improve their practice,” Mr Bruni quoted him as saying about tenure. “It provides no accountability to actual student outcomes. It’s the classic driver of, ‘I taught it, they didn’t learn it, not my problem.’ It has a decimating impact on morale among staff, because some people can work hard, some can do nothing, and it doesn’t matter.”