-- ZaneMuller - 09 Apr 2018

I want to continue a conversation from office hours this past Friday around the issue of teacher tenure. The essential question is whether removing or changing some of the laws that protect teachers from being fired is likely to improve student outcomes, especially for the poorest students attending the most segregated schools.

In 2014, a California court ruled in Vergara v. California that the state's tenure laws "were unconstitutional because they ultimately translated into a disproportionate amount of ineffective teachers working in schools that served primarily poor black and Latino students." This holding was, however, reversed on appeal, and the CA Supreme Court declined to hear it. (Reading about this case was one of the reasons I left teaching and came to law school, having seen this kind of thing firsthand.)

There's a similar case, Davids v. New York, currently working its way through the New York courts. It rests on a similar theory to Vergara, and a little over a week ago survived an appeal of a denial of summary judgment.

I am instinctively sympathetic to unions and believe that teachers generally are in need of a lot more respect, support and compensation than opprobrium, but my working theory is that the Vergara and Davids plaintiffs are basically right, and that weakening some of these protections would be in students' best interests (and most teachers' best interests in the long run). But it's not so simple, as opponents of the decision Erwin Chemerinsky and Richard Kahlenberg illustrate.

What do you all think?