Labor unions got a big win yesterday as an appeals court overturned a lower court's 2014 ruling in Vergara v. California.
The case centered around the plaintiff's argument that teacher tenure protects what they call "grossly ineffective" teachers from being fired.
The belief is that under-performing teachers are disproportionately distributed in schools located in areas with poor or minority kids, thereby, denying these students their right to a quality education.
James E. Ryan, Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, joined Take Two to discuss.
"There's a pretty decent consensus," said Ryan, that kids in poor schools with higher numbers of students of color are more likely to be taught by inexperienced and ineffective teachers, but the argument that California tenure and firing procedures was the cause of this distribution was "harder to follow." Ryan says:
“The problem was that by focusing just on the back-end of the process-- how you could get rid of teachers-- didn’t do much or it was hard to see the connection to the front-end of the process, that is to say, if it’s the case that the 'ineffective' teachers are more likely to be in schools that are predominantly poor, predominantly students of color, then changing the rules on the back-end doesn’t do anything to disrupt the that initial distribution.”
The appellate court indicated that the solution to this distribution problem lies in the hands of local administrators.
"Superintendents and principals are involved in the decision about where teachers are assigned and when they can be transferred. But I think if you take a broader view, the real question is how do we increase the supply of effective teachers and there I think you start with teacher preparation and teacher support. You have to pay attention to teacher pay and working conditions as well, and then you also need to pay attention to what are the rules about transferring teachers from one school to another." Said Ryan.
The plaintiffs say they plan to take the fight all the way to the California Supreme Court, which has the final word on the case. Ryan said the possibility of the case going to the Supreme Court of the United States is unlikely.
"That won’t happen because the only issue is one of state law, so the California Supreme Court will have the final word. Sometimes decisions are appealed to the US Supreme Court, but that's only because they involve questions of federal law. Here it’s just a question of California law."