California high court divided in tenure decision

Jerry Brown, a Democrat, appealed the ruling, and an appeals court overturned that decision in April, saying the students had failed to show California’s hiring and firing rules were unconstitutional.

“The mining laws were neither a guarantee that mining would prove feasible nor a grant of immunity against local regulation, but simply an assurance that the ultimate original landowner, the United States, would not interfere by asserting its own property rights”, she wrote.

The five laws challenged in the case were a statute that gives teachers permanent tenure after two years, three laws that provide procedural protections to teachers whom school districts are seeking to dismiss for incompetence, and one law requiring layoffs to be in the order of least seniority.

The decision leaves in place a lower court’s court ruling that upheld tenure and other job protections for teachers.

In a unanimous decision, the seven justices ruled that a California state ban on the mining technique was not preempted by a 19th century federal law that was passed to promote mining on federal lands.

But the California Charter Schools Association ha been spending heavily in State Legislative races, and is expected to challenge the teacher unions for supremacy in the next few years.

“I hope this decision closes the book on the flawed and divisive argument that links educators’ workplace protections with student disadvantage”, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said in a statement. “The state of California, like many others, remains in the throes of a serious teacher shortage”. They say they have a right to protect the state’s environment that is not pre-empted by federal mining law. Even if all those suits are ultimately unsuccessful, Joshua Dunn, associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs, argues the damage has already been done to teacher tenure. “You can’t fire your way to a better public education system”. Welch said he was hopeful the legislature would take up the issue.

“It is time for California lawmakers to focus on the inequities that rob our most vulnerable students from access to highly-effective teachers”, said Mike Stryer, Teach Plus California Senior Executive Director.

Associate Justice Goodwin Liu said the case affected millions of students statewide and presented a significant legal issue that the lower court likely got wrong.

The plaintiffs were nine schoolchildren backed by the nonprofit advocacy group Student Matters, and they had argued that job-protection statutes for teachers created illegal inequalities: They said poor and minority children were more likely to be saddled with ineffective teachers who were hard to fire.