Vergara v. California

Based on Wikipedia: Vergara v. California

The Trial That Put Teaching Quality on Trial

Imagine a courtroom where the defendant isn't a person, but a set of laws. Laws that had governed California's public school teachers for decades. The accusation? That these statutes were so fundamentally flawed that they violated the constitutional rights of millions of students.

This was Vergara v. California, a lawsuit that erupted in 2012 and wound its way through California's courts for four years. At its heart lay a deceptively simple question: Do students have a constitutional right not just to education, but to effective teachers?

Nine California public school students—children, really—became the named plaintiffs. Their lawyers argued something that sounds almost too obvious to need stating: that some teachers are "grossly ineffective," and that laws making it nearly impossible to remove such teachers violated students' rights. The twist? They claimed these laws hit poor and minority students hardest, since ineffective teachers were disproportionately assigned to their schools.

What Made These Laws So Problematic?

The lawsuit targeted five specific statutes, but they all circled the same basic problem: once a teacher got tenure, removing them became almost impossible.

Here's how California's tenure system worked. A teacher would be hired. If the school district didn't cancel their contract by March of their second year, they automatically received "permanent employment" status—what everyone called tenure. Not after five years of demonstrated excellence. Not after rigorous evaluation. After roughly eighteen months.

The timeline was even more absurd than it first appeared. That March deadline came before the school year ended, so administrators actually had to make tenure decisions partway through a teacher's second year. Meanwhile, the credentialing process—where new teachers completed their training and proved their competence—lasted two full school years. The result? A district could grant tenure to a teacher in March who then failed to earn their credential in May. You'd have an uncredentialed teacher with lifetime job protections.

Experts on both sides of the case agreed this was too fast. Even witnesses called by the school administrators acknowledged that three to five years would be more appropriate. Looking at other states, California was an outlier: thirty-two states required three years before granting tenure, nine required four to five years, and four states had eliminated tenure entirely.

The Labyrinth of Dismissal

But tenure was only half the problem. The other half was what happened when a school district identified a genuinely terrible teacher and tried to remove them.

California had created an elaborate series of procedural requirements for dismissing tenured teachers. The plaintiffs called it prohibitively expensive and time-consuming—far beyond the due process protections given to other civil servants in the state. John Deasy, who ran the Los Angeles Unified School District (the second-largest district in America), testified that these statutes actively harmed students.

The court didn't mince words. It acknowledged that teachers deserved due process before being fired—that's a "legitimate issue." But it concluded that California had created "uber due process," protections so extensive they effectively made dismissal impossible regardless of how poorly a teacher performed.

Think about what this meant in practice. A school district might identify a teacher who was demonstrably harming students' academic progress. But the time, money, and legal complexity required to remove that teacher was so daunting that many districts simply... didn't try. They shuffled ineffective teachers between schools, or let them continue teaching, or waited for retirement. Anything but the dismissal process.

Last In, First Out

The final challenged statute governed layoffs. When California school districts needed to reduce their teaching staff—as many did during budget cuts—they had to follow a strict rule: last hired, first fired. The technical term is LIFO, for Last In, First Out.

Seniority was the only factor that mattered. Teacher effectiveness? Irrelevant. A brilliant young educator who had transformed her classroom? Gone. A veteran teacher who had been damaging students' learning for years? Protected.

The trial court's opinion didn't hold back: "No matter how gifted the junior teacher, and no matter how grossly ineffective the senior teacher, the junior gifted one... is separated from [the students] and a senior grossly ineffective one... is left in place."

The judge called this logic "unfathomable and therefore constitutionally unsupportable."

Again, California stood out nationally. Only ten states required seniority as the sole factor in layoff decisions. Twenty states allowed districts to consider seniority alongside other factors like teacher quality. Eighteen states and Washington, D.C. left the criteria entirely to district discretion. Two states went further, prohibiting seniority from being considered at all.

Counting the Cost

How bad were the worst teachers? The trial produced some striking numbers.

Thomas Kane, a Harvard economist, presented research from a four-year study of the Los Angeles Unified School District. Students taught by a teacher in the bottom five percent of competence lost 9.54 months of learning in a single year compared to students with average teachers. Think about that. A child spends a school year in a classroom and ends up nearly a full grade level behind where they would have been with a merely average instructor.

David Berliner, an expert who actually testified for the defendant school administrators (not the plaintiffs), acknowledged that between one and three percent of California teachers were grossly ineffective. With roughly 275,000 active teachers in the state, that translated to somewhere between 2,750 and 8,250 grossly ineffective teachers in California classrooms.

Those aren't small numbers. They represent tens of thousands of students assigned each year to teachers who are actively hindering their education.

The Constitutional Question

But was any of this unconstitutional? That was the legal question the courts had to answer.

Judge Rolf Treu began his opinion by invoking Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision that struck down school segregation. He also cited Serrano v. Priest, California cases from the 1970s that established students' right to equal educational opportunity, and Butt v. State of California from 1992.

These precedents had addressed equality of educational opportunity—making sure all students had access to schools, to funding, to resources. Vergara pushed further. It asked whether students had a right not just to access education, but to quality education. To be taught by teachers who were actually effective.

Applying strict scrutiny—the most demanding standard of judicial review—Judge Treu found that the challenged statutes violated the equal protection clause of the California Constitution. In June 2014, he ruled that the disparities created by these laws "shock the conscience."

Who Fought This Battle?

Behind every lawsuit are the people and organizations that make it happen.

The student plaintiffs were funded by David Welch, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who founded Students Matter, a nonprofit education reform organization that paid the attorneys' fees. The students were represented by Gibson Dunn, a major law firm.

The plaintiffs assembled an impressive lineup of expert witnesses. Eric Hanushek of Stanford University provided analyses of teacher effectiveness and the economic cost of ineffective teaching. Raj Chetty and Thomas Kane, both from Harvard, testified about how ineffective teachers were distributed across California schools. Dan Goldhaber from the University of Washington addressed the impact of LIFO layoff rules.

On the defense side, the California Attorney General represented school administrators. The California Teachers Association—the state's largest teachers union—intervened to defend the statutes. Their experts included Linda Darling Hammond from Stanford, David Berliner from Arizona State, and Susan Moore Johnson from Harvard.

Jesse Rothstein of UC Berkeley testified that tenure restrictions actually served students' interests. His argument, broadly, was that job protections help attract quality teachers to the profession and protect good teachers from arbitrary firing.

The Appeals Court Strikes Back

The trial court ruling sent shockwaves through education policy circles. The very next day, the Associated Press described it as "a landmark decision that could influence the gathering debate over tenure across the country."

But the ruling was quickly appealed. California Governor Jerry Brown himself weighed in, reasoning that changes of this magnitude required appellate review.

On February 25, 2016, the case went before a three-judge panel of the California Court of Appeal. Two months later, they unanimously overturned the trial court's decision.

Their reasoning was narrow but devastating to the plaintiffs' case. The appeals court found that the student plaintiffs' attorneys "failed to show that the statutes themselves make any certain group of students more likely to be taught by ineffective teachers than any other group of students."

This was a crucial distinction. The statutes didn't assign bad teachers to poor schools. The statutes merely made bad teachers hard to fire. The actual assignment of teachers to schools—who taught where—was a local administrative decision. And the appellate judges found that "the evidence... revealed deplorable staffing decisions being made by some local administrators that have a deleterious impact on poor and minority students."

In other words: yes, poor and minority students were more likely to get bad teachers. But that was the fault of how districts implemented these laws, not the laws themselves. And fixing administrative decisions wasn't the court's job. As the judges wrote, they were there "merely to determine whether the statutes are constitutional, not if they are 'a good idea.'"

The Final Word

The plaintiffs asked California's Supreme Court to take another look. On August 22, 2016, the state's highest court declined, in a 4-3 decision. The challenged statutes would stand.

The four justices in the majority issued no explanation beyond a standard statement that declining to review a case "represents only a determination that, for whatever reason, a grant of review is not appropriate at the time."

But two of the three dissenting justices wrote passionate statements explaining why they believed the case deserved review.

Justice Goodwin Liu argued that the court owed California's schoolchildren "our transparent and reasoned judgment on whether the challenged statutes deprive a significant subset of students of their fundamental right to education."

Justice Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar posed the question even more starkly. Were the problems identified in Vergara merely "the usual blemishes in governance" that come with any institution implementing laws and making tradeoffs? Or were they "staggering failures that threaten to turn the right to education for California schoolchildren into an empty promise"?

The court declined to answer.

Ripples Across the Nation

Vergara may have failed in the courts, but it sparked a national conversation.

Less than a month after the trial court's ruling, a similar lawsuit called Davids v. New York was filed in New York State. In April 2016, another suit emerged in Minnesota challenging that state's tenure rules and seniority-based layoff procedures.

Teachers unions framed the appellate victories as vindication. The California Teachers Association called Vergara a "case brought by wealthy anti-public education millionaires who spent millions of dollars to bypass voters, parents, and the legislature in an attempt to impose their harmful education agenda on local schools."

Education reformers saw things differently. To them, Vergara exposed real problems even if it didn't fix them. The trial had produced testimony from school administrators themselves acknowledging that these laws made it nearly impossible to remove harmful teachers. Experts on both sides had agreed that California's tenure timeline was too short. The evidence about the damage done by ineffective teachers went essentially unchallenged.

The Deeper Question

What makes Vergara so fascinating, even years later, is the tension at its core.

On one side: children have a right to effective education. Some teachers are demonstrably bad at their jobs. Students assigned to them fall behind. Those students are disproportionately poor and minority. The system that protects those teachers harms those students.

On the other side: teachers need job protections. Without them, good teachers could be fired for arbitrary reasons—for teaching controversial topics, for giving failing grades to well-connected students, for advocating for their own schools. Tenure isn't just about protecting bad teachers; it's about creating conditions where good teachers can teach freely. And if the problem is how administrators assign teachers to schools, fix the administrators, not the teacher protection laws.

Both arguments have merit. The Vergara case forced them into direct collision.

The courts ultimately sided with the status quo—not because the laws were good, but because changing them was the legislature's job, not the judiciary's. The problems were real, but they weren't constitutional violations.

For the nine student plaintiffs whose names became attached to this case, that distinction probably felt abstract. Somewhere in California, there were still between 2,750 and 8,250 grossly ineffective teachers. Students were still being assigned to them. Those students were still, according to the research, losing nearly a year of learning annually.

The statutes remained on the books. The conscience, presumably, remained unshocked.