Peter Schrag has written sensibly about education issues for many years.
In this article, he analyzes the complexities of the Vergara trial, in which a rich and powerful coalition of corporate reformers are trying to eliminate due process rights for teachers.
In the end, he argues, the outcome of the trial won’t change much for poor kids.
If the plaintiffs win, some very good veteran teachers may be fired to save money.
The legislature will enact some new laws, perhaps basing layoffs on “effectiveness” (i.e. test scores) rather than due process, but as we know from the recent report of the American Statistical Association, test-based accountability (VAM) is fraught with problems and will end up stigmatizing those who teach in high-poverty schools.
He quotes Russlyn Ali, who was Secretary Arne Duncan’s assistant secretary for civil rights and is now supporting the Vergara plaintiffs:
Laws that make it hard to dismiss or replace teachers were originally designed to protect them against the nepotism and the racial, social and cultural biases that were all too common in education until well after World War II. If those protections are curtailed, and if a new system relying heavily on “effectiveness” — itself an uncertain standard — is put in place, what’s to say it won’t make teachers competitors and undermine morale and collaboration?
It’s possible that if the courts find that the tenure laws in this case offend constitutional equal protection guarantees, many of the system’s other inequities might be open to legal challenge as well. Ali, among others, has that hope, and she sees Vergara as a first step in that larger battle.
But if the Vergara plaintiffs win a resounding victory in this case, don’t look for any quick change in the schools or some great improvement in outcomes for disadvantaged kids. There are just too many other uncertainties, too many inequities, too many other unmet needs.
My view: the trial continues the blame game favored by the Obama administration and the billionaire boys’ club, in which they blame “bad” teachers as the main culprit in low academic performance. Their refusal to recognize that standardized tests accurately measure family income and family education is their blind spot. It is easier to blame teachers than to take strong action to reduce poverty and racial segregation. It is sad and ironic that the most segregated schools in the United States today are charter schools, yet the Obama administration wants more of them. If the Vergara plaintiffs win, there will be fewer teachers eager to risk their reputation teaching the kids who have the greatest needs. If the plaintiffs win, this case will then be a setback for the rights of the kids, no victory at all.
If the corporate reformers refuse to attack the root causes of low test scores, then Peter Schrag is quite right to say that nothing much will change.
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/commentary/la-oe-schrag-vergara-teacher-union-20140403,0,3459594.story#ixzz2ygmthcp2
Diane Ravitch's blog 
So that mean if we decide teachers job based on the performance of children, then it should be okay to decide the future of politician by their lack of success rate.
Fire all the politicians.
The sole purpose of the Vergera case is to undermine public schools and teacher unions, Plaintiffs have no interest in any reform of public schools, insofar as such reform could improve the public schools.
I believe that this will take years before a final decision is reached. It will go before the Supreme Court before it is final. The teacher’s unions are going to fight it. You can throw the Kansas legislation in bed with it and send them both to the Supreme Court.
Funny how nervous Brownback is with the national ed reform agenda, though. They recorded him saying he’d sign the anti-labor bill, when he’s telling the public he hasn’t made up his mind yet:
“An Emporia radio station recorded Gov. Sam Brownback saying he will sign a controversial school finance bill into law, about three hours before he told reporters in Wichita he hasn’t made up his mind.
In a presentation to local leaders at Emporia State University on Monday, Brownback said he will sign a bill containing allocations for the university. Those allocations are contained in House Bill 2506, an education budget bill that provides additional money to comply with a Supreme Court order that found inequities in funding between rich and poor school districts.
The bill also would change state law to strip veteran K-12 teachers of due process protections from summary dismissal.
Emporia-based KVOE radio has posted on its website an audio clip recorded Monday morning in which the governor says: “Emporia State, when I sign the budget, and I will, will receive $572,000, over $572,000, in salary cap restoration for this fiscal year.
The statement Brownback made in Emporia conflicts with statements he made hours later following a similar event, where he hailed legislative action to provide additional funding for Wichita State University, which is also contained in the bill.
In Wichita, the governor told reporters he hadn’t made up his mind on HB 2506 and when asked directly if he might veto the bill, he said “Sure, and we will consider that”
http://www.kansas.com/2014/04/15/3406594/will-brownback-sign-school-finance.html
I’m or was considering a move back to Kansas but it seems that education funding and teacher expectations are more messed up there than in Texas.
Gee, I almost feel sorry for Brownback. It has to suck when you know your voters want something diametrically opposed to what your donors want and there’s no way to reconcile the two.
Okay, nah, I don’t feel the least bit sorry for him.
Yes, the case will crawl its way up from the trial court. Given the current ideology of ‘the supremes’, taking years for a hearing and ruling won’t be long enough.
agreed…if it takes 10-15-20 years it won’t be long enough..
Teachers are already being blacklisted and publicly shamed by states posting flawed VAM scores. Those of us that work with the most challenging students are being penalized.
It’s definitely an odd case. I’d like to see some commentary from con law professors who’ve been following it.
Russlynn Ali is also a headliner at Governor Cuomo’s exclusive retreat for ed reform lobbyists:
http://www.campphilos.org/
The LA Times today reported that our Governor Brown is in support of proposed new legislation by State Rep Buchanan to fire teachers more rapidly if they are accused, not convicted, of egregious behaviors such as drug use, child abuse/molestation, etc.
Vergara was clearly set up to be a major step in breaking the backs of teachers’ unions as a first step in getting rid of all American unions. It will indeed probably be a case that reaches SCOTUS, and with the current 5 -4 reactionary and activist voting block, could very well bring a rapid decision…and a far reaching expanded decision as was the case in Citizens United. This could be a death knell for the union movement which produced a strong middle class after WW 2, but is now not strong enough to get a fair minimum wage for all, nor health care for all, muchless protect teachers.
Note: LAUSD teachers and parents…
Please join a group of us from Joining Forces for Education at the ostensible “parents’ forum” today from 5:30 – 7:30 at CSUN in the Oviatt Library Presentation Hall. Gabe Rose, PR guy for the notorius Parent Revolution group run by Ben Austin, will be a featured speaker.
Please come prepared to ask him questions about Parent Rev and their main funders, The Walton Foundation and Eli Broad (questions will be asked from the floor, not written, and we have been invited to make brief statements as well)…and their previous intimidating methods to get non-English speaking parents to sign their petitions to charterize inner city public schools. Also questions on their future goals and results of the charters they have embedded in public schools.
“Dienne
April 16, 2014 at 2:52 pm
Gee, I almost feel sorry for Brownback. It has to suck when you know your voters want something diametrically opposed to what your donors want and there’s no way to reconcile the two.
Okay, nah, I don’t feel the least bit sorry for him.”
This is what he’s worried about:
“PPP’s newest Kansas poll finds that Sam Brownback has continued to become even more unpopular in the last year, and that he slightly trails his Democratic opponent for reelection. Only 33% of voters in the state approve of the job Brownback is doing, compared to 51% who disapprove.
There are a few big issues causing Brownback trouble. Only 26% of voters in the state think his much heralded tax plan has been a success, compared to 47% who feel it hasn’t been. And voters are also at odds with Brownback on education funding. 59% of voters in the state think the schools are inadequately funded, compared to 31% who think they receive enough state money, and by a 59/29 spread they want the Kansas Supreme Court to rule that funding has to be increased. Brownback’s even losing his party on this issue- 47% of Republicans want the Supreme Court to require more education funding to 40% who are opposed.”
Every poll says parents simply want public education funded, and yet every politician ignores that and uses public schools and teachers as a political punching bag.
It’s almost like they’re listening to lobbyists rather than the public. I’m starting to suspect 🙂
– See more at: http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/main/2014/02/brownback-extremely-unpopular-trails-for-reelection.html#sthash.9B4RI70L.dpuf
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
John White @LouisianaSupe 29m
25,000 Louisiana students took @PARCCPlace test in last 3 wks. Dry run 1 yr in advance. Check out what we learned: http://www.louisianabelieves.com/docs/default-source/teacher-toolbox-resources/parcc-field-test-report.pdf?sfvrsn=4 …
Details
They’ve identified areas to improve. The biggest problem with the test, is, well, STUDENTS.
They don’t know how to “use the new tools”, so will receive more training.
My eldest son works in the tech industry and I think if the tool he created doesn’t work for the intended user, he creates a better tool rather than creating a better user, but maybe he’s an outlier 🙂
This move on their part registered 8.8 Colemans on the arrogance and ignorance coincidence scale.
Why shouldn’t we become tattle-tale backstabbers, clawing and fighting everyday to keep our jobs just just like everyone else in the business world? Oh that’s right because most of the people we work with every day are CHILDREN. We should be able to be above all that. We should be collaborating with each other in the best interest of the CHILDREN. Not trying to keep our jobs at all costs, including acing out the competition (ie fellow teachers), in front of CHILDREN! We should be be reviewed by our administrators in a way our, tax paying, community feels is best for THEIR children…not what some corporate big wig thinks is appropriate, hundreds of miles away! Maybe that’s really why educators have protections in place…so they can protect your CHILDREN, for a few precious years, from the corporate rat race competition they’ll eventually go to in the work place (they certainly shouldn’t have to suffer it at school…but will if you pit teacher against teacher, cause we need our jobs too).
Oh yes, and they will allow students to have power over their teachers. Look at the case, it has students blaming teachers for their own failures. Who will want to work in this type of environment? It shows that the case is not about better teachers in these areas. If you have lower pay, security, benefits, and above all respect, who will want these jobs?
Kids already have power over their teachers. In my state, part of our evaluation comes from student and parent surveys. Kids a young as Kindergarten, as well as kids with severe, multiple disabilities, have to rate their teachers. For the younger kids, the scores are done by color: red, yellow and green. However, no one thought about the fact that some kids are color blind until I brought it up.
Value-added methods were applied to public education in the 1970s but that work was published in journals for economic research. The big migration into education came from what I call the “Seeds, Sows, and Cows” research of Dr. William Sanders, a statistician specializing in agricultural genetics at the University of Tennessee. In the late 1990s Saunders and his students developed and published value-added assessments of Tennessee teachers using norm-referenced test scores in a political and publicity context that gained traction. And the dismay of experts in testing such as the late Gerald Bracy. Bracy noticed that the decision to use norm referenced data necessarily created stack rankings of teachers that echoed the bell curve of the norm-referenced tests.
Saunders dismissed this and other criticisms, later become the senior statistician at SAS, a company whose software programs are designed for value-added (growth measures) based on comparisons of test scores.
The proprietary formulas of SAS are used in Ohio and many other states. I requested copies of the SAS contracts in Ohio. The VAM formula was not available, only PR from the company and the contract for deliverables, several million for two years of VAM reports, complete with legal language that puts the burden on Ohio officials to provide reliable test scores. If gargage goes in, garbage comes out. Reliable test scores are not necessariy valid, but who cares?
I think it is useful to restate some rudimentary ideas about genetic engineering, not only as the recent source of statistical methods for evaluating teacher productivity of test scores, but also as a metaphor operating below a threshold of much public and professional discussion in “re-engineering” education.
Genetic engineering is the study of ways to alter or select traits of plants and animal species. The studies are made in order to perfect ways to propagate superior traits, accelerate genetic improvement, and produce transformations that incorporate new features (e.g., capacity to resist disease), or functions (e.g., terminator seeds that grow sterile plants).
The technologies of genetic engineering also have unintended consequences. Among the major risks are: disturbing a thriving ecological system, doing harm to strengths in existing species, creating unexpected and toxic reactions in the reproductive systems of individuals (or groups or species), and engineering interventions that produce resistence to an intended benefit. Other concerns bear on unhealthy concentrations of traits by inbreeding, and the irreversibility of these processes.
Although selected techniques of statistical estimation (e.g., mixed model analysis of variance, “percent cumulative norm gain”) have many uses beyond education, other lessons that might be learned from genetic engineering as a metaphor (and program) in education have not been as fully examined and publicized.
So far, the use of VAMs has done more harm than good. These are not benign metrics. There is no evidence that VAMs help to select teachers for “superior” traits, or that their mandated use has increase student learning. These are not benign metrics. They are toxic.
The Vergara backers are a pack of liars. They have to know that teachers don’t have lifetime jobs, and they merely have the same rights as other public employees.
These nitwits I suppose don’t even understand why civil service protections exist.
Schrag lost me by playing the plaintiffs’ game claiming “tenure” is “lifetime employment” for K-12 teachers. I refused to read the rest of his piece because of that. He displayed fundamental ignorance about teaching. Teachers in K-12 don’t have “tenure” regardless of what state statutes call civil service protections for teachers, and they can easily be forced out of their jobs. If somebody writing an article doesn’t know what he is talking about, he shouldn’t write it in the first place. He should have talked to a few terminated LAUSD teachers who had “lifetime jobs” before writing such a pile of ignorant garbage.
Yes, the unions will fight it, but John Deasy will ensure that it is enforced in LAUSD immediately. He is ordering principals in low performing schools (poor) to give below standards and unsats. No evidence required, as is the case with teacher jail. 20 teachers a week are sent to the gulags.
Yes, Taxpaying and Susan…agree with your comments.
I am sad to see so few LA teachers and others commenting here on this California and LAUSD issue. We in California face great problems with more charters than any other state, a more diverse and larger population, and the Deasy/Broad empire that is rapidly taking over our school system.
I just returned from the CSUN meeting and no one from this or other local blog sites showed up. What is wrong with the ‘wronged teachers’ that they make no effort to show up at meetings where they can state their case in a public forum. I have pretty much decided to give up on trying to get folks to turn out for events and show some unity.
These issues were prominent at the CSUN parents’ forum this evening. It was very worthwhile and I am writing it up as a feature article.
Peter Schrag is wrong. If Vergara wins, it will indeed affect the education of LAUSD’s most vulnerable (poor children of color) students. TFAers right out of college with no expert teachers to mentor them!!?? Most new teachers can’t even lead a kindergarten class to lunch. Majority of principals and administrators in LAUSD have the same minimal 5 years or less classroom experience, so don’t count on them for help. Yes, this IS the civil rights movement of our time.
Ellen, Many teachers who have been wronged, as you say, need to keep their info confidential. There are hearings and lawsuits to be filed. Best advice: document, document, document. DO NOT QUIT, teachers. Make them fire you. You can’t win unless you learn how to play the game. Do unto others as they do onto you.
From my memory of my long past days in law school studying Con Law, I tend to agree with some of Flerp’s contentions, particularly #3.
But the way the case was presented for the Plaintiffs, as a civil rights case, it seems moot.
And yes, truth teller, if the case is ruled in favor of the Plaintiffs, it will reinforce the strength of TFA certainly at LAUSD and the struggling inner city students will have really inept teaching.
An amazing older woman from the Black community where she has been a lifelong education activist, brought up this issue last night at the CSUN meeting, and she was seconded with similar comments by Latino activists. These very savvy parent activists have their info clear and accutate…and all said the LAUSD District, despite the de facto (and de jure) law, never did and still does not listen to them…all the while the CEO, Mr. Deasy, putting on a smiling face and testifying to the detriment of teachers but in favor of Vergara.
Next week Wendy Kopp is speaking under the auspices of Los Angeles World Affairs Council with Eli Broad as her sponsor, and he will surely introduce her with similar glowing words about her and about TFA as he did a year ago in introducing his darling Michelle Rhee….but as a reminder…he did not permit Diane Ravitch to speak at his golden inner circle of some of the richest men in the world…many of whom are now charter owners…and all are charter supporters…to enrich their private investment accounts.
If anyone wants more info on this…please contact me at
joiningforces4ed@aol.com
If Vergara stands, teachers HAVE to fight this in the courts. They won’t win, however, if they don’t even understand that they don’t really have “tenure” in the first place.
My very first education class told us students exactly what “protections” had and why. It has to do with property rights and government. Same thing as other public employees.
Let’s look at the dystopia society we are apparently striving towards.
Middle class families get vouchers for the best charter schools where teachers are financially rewarded for the resulting high VAM scores.
The wealthy continue to send their children to private schools where no testing is necessary. These are are our future leaders who cannot mingle with the other classes in fear of contamination with the wrong ideas of how life should be lived.
Special Ed students are assigned to separate schools so as not to bring down the test results of the privileged charter schools. English Language learners are also segregated as are anyone receiving free or reduced lunch.
Minorities are limited to neighborhood schools unless their parents have professional jobs. These non producing local schools, almost 100% segregated, are staffed by uncertified college grads who sign on for a year or two. Their salaries are half that of the certified teachers who work at schools in the voucher program. No staff member can remain at any one school due to low test scores. After three years, they are either fired, and if certified their credentials are revoked. (Unions have been banned). That is why only uncertified volunteers are willing to work there – as a public service, of course. There are only two subjects taught – reading and math.
Only the high level charter schools offer electives such as social studies, science, or the arts. After school activities for the inner city schools consist of tutoring. To play a sport or be in the band/chorus, the student must score a three or four on the national assessment. This keeps the rabble where they belong.
Some might call this the caste system. However, we are not saying these low scoring students are untouchable, we just don’t want them near our children.
Ellen…namesake…once again we are on the same page. Your words are verbatim what Latino and Black parents and activists said tonight about LAUSD. It is endemic in American society…and the inequity in wealth creates a permanent underclass..as you say, of untouchables.
Gabe Rose, a nice misinformed young guy who shills for the notorius Ben Austin of Parent Revolution repeatedly generated hyperbole about how only the parent trigger law and Parent Rev were teaching immigrant parents about our democratic government…as with their brand of parental involvement. Trigger is apt since the Waltons are their prime funders, and the Waltons also are the prime funders for Stand Your Ground laws nationwide…as in fast on the trigger.
Without all of us in the streets, public education will perish.
Elizabeth Warren for President.
I could live with an Elizabeth Warren as President. The men have mucked it up, let’s show the country what a woman can do.
The other Ellen.
Myself, I am backing Bernie Sanders. Warren isn’t going to run for president.
If either Warren or Sanders run, and Bernie says he will, I will be working for them.
From todays NYT:
LOS ANGELES — These are two vastly different portraits of California’s education system. In one, poor and minority students are frequently placed in front of incompetent teachers whose blackboards are filled with basic misspellings and who play irrelevant movies instead of devising lesson plans for class time. In the other, the vast majority of teachers are providing students with all they need to learn, and well-run school districts are able to ferret out and dismiss the ones who are not.
For more than two months, lawyers have been arguing in state court over whether California’s laws governing teacher tenure, firing and layoffs violate students’ constitutional right to an education. And by the beginning of July, Rolf Treu, a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge, will deliver the first legal ruling on the case, which has attracted national attention. In states around the country, opponents of tenure rules, who have tried and largely failed to bring about changes through state legislatures, are looking to this case as a test of whether taking their arguments to court could prove more successful.
Photo
Dr. John E. Deasy, superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, testified in January. Credit Monica Almeida/The New York Times
Lawyers for the students named in the case, Vergara v. California, have argued that California students are subject to an unfair system that deprives them of a fair education, which translates into the loss of millions of dollars in potential earnings over their lifetimes. But lawyers for the state and the teachers’ unions counter that the problems in the system have little or nothing to do with the rules that govern how teachers are hired and fired.
In many ways, the case echoes the political debate over tenure that has gone on for years. Some school superintendents and education advocates have pushed to loosen laws granting teachers permanent employment status, which they argue are anachronistic and harmful. Unions and their allies, however, say such laws are necessary to protect teachers.
Three states and the District of Columbia have eliminated tenure, and a few other states prohibit using seniority as the primary criterion to determine who is laid off. But efforts to enact similar changes have repeatedly failed in California and New York, where teachers’ unions hold considerable sway over the state legislatures.
Students Matter, a group backed by David F. Welch, a Silicon Valley technology magnate, recruited a group of students to file as plaintiffs against the state of California and hired a high-profile legal team to try to win the debate in the courtroom. No matter what Judge Treu decides, the case will almost certainly be appealed, and Mr. Welch has said he plans to help bring similar cases around the country.
Under California law, teachers are eligible for tenure after 18 months on the job, and the teachers who are hired most recently are the first to lose their jobs during layoffs. School administrators who try to dismiss a teacher with tenure for poor performance must complete a lengthy procedure.
“Students taught by grossly ineffective teachers fall behind for years,” said Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., the lead lawyer for the plaintiffs, who is best known for winning the case that struck down California’s ban on same-sex marriage.
Students who are taught by such teachers lose up to $1.4 million in lifetime earnings compared with those who are taught by average teachers, according to a study by Raj Chetty, an economics professor at Harvard who testified on behalf of the plaintiffs.
In another study cited in court testimony, students in the Los Angeles Unified School District lost a full year’s worth of learning when they were placed with teachers in the bottom 5 percent of the district in terms of effectiveness. Assuming that 1 percent of the state’s roughly 275,000 teachers are ineffective, it would take more than 12 years to dismiss them all, according to the plaintiffs’ closing brief. And according to the plaintiffs, students who are black, Latino or poor are far more likely to be placed with a low-performing teacher than their white and more affluent peers.
“Even if funding and time in school are equal, students still cannot be assured of equal educational opportunities unless they have equal access to effective teachers,” Mr. Boutrous wrote in the final brief, submitted last week.
But lawyers for the state and the teachers’ unions say that while the plaintiffs have relied on complicated algorithms and emotional speech, they have done nothing to prove that students’ constitutional rights are being violated by existing teacher employment laws. In fact, the state’s lawyers argued in closing briefs, one of the teachers cited by plaintiffs as “grossly ineffective” was awarded “Teacher of the Year” by the Pasadena school district.
“Due process ensures that competent teachers aren’t dismissed unfairly or improperly,” James Finberg, a lawyer for the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers, wrote in his closing brief. The achievement gap, as the disparity between wealthy white students and poor minority students is often called, “has many causes, the majority of which involve out-of-school factors,” Mr. Finberg wrote, before arguing that high teacher turnover in low-income schools could be improved with additional funding, not a change in employment law.
In order for the NYS teacher’s unions to stay viable, they were forced to sell out to the demands of the state. And you know, NY teacher, that many excellent schools in NYS are now being ruined by the implementation of the Common Core. They already were excellent institutions where teaching was receiving optimum results. Now, according to the new assessments with the new standards, they are failing miserably, lumped in with formerly failing schools.
Nothing like taking a good thing and throwing it in the trash.
It’s not going to do anybody any good to write about something they know nothing about. ALL public employees, including teachers, have seniority rights and the right to due process because a government job is a property right that cannot be denied without due process. Almost all businesses also operate on the seniority system.
Lots of principals in LAUSD’s poorest communities don’t know how to write teachers up properly. Administration relies on them to do their dirty work. If Vergara wins, there will be some bittersweet justice as these same principals will eventually be replaced by former corporate execs.
Correct, truth teller, about the errors. Many of us have seen copies of mishandled reports, even from the LAUSD CEO…and as to the NY Times article, it is to be questioned from the get go wherein the writer calls the LAUSD “Dr” when the world now knows that his PhD is questionable and even teachers and parents now call him “Mr”.
This is not remotely in my area of practice. But it seems to me that this case may ultimately turn whether the court applies strict scrutiny to the challenged statutes. If it applies strict scrutiny, the plaintiffs will almost certainly win. There are a lot of steps in the analysis, but ultimately, the evidence will determine the legal standard (strict scrutiny versus rational basis): if the statutes have a “real and appreciable” impact on the fundamental right of equal opportunity to education, then the court will apply strict scrutiny.
What’s a “real and appreciable” impact and what isn’t? I don’t know, and there’s probably case law on that question. But it may be that it just requires proof that the statutes have some effect on the quality of students’ education, and that this effect can be measured. It may not require any quantum of proof beyond that (although there’s also a causation analysis that has to happen separately).
My point being that it may not be relevant whether teacher quality has a large (or “significant,” or “substantial”) impact on the quality of students’ education, or whether it’s more important than funding levels, poverty, family, etc. It seems to me that all that matters is whether it has any impact that can be measured. If the plaintiffs prove that, and if the plaintiffs prove that the statutes have a negative effect on teacher quality (which may be a whole separate analysis), then the defendants could be in trouble.
Again, to be clear, this is not my area, I’m just drawing on a very musty recollection of con law and some logical reasoning.
It’s just a b.s. suit put forward by privatizer interests in their aim to destroy the public sector.
Civil service protections exist to prevent favoritism.
I guess that’s another kind of analysis.
I happen to know this system intimately, unlike almost everybody else here. Due process rights and seniority rights are applicable to all public employees because a government/public sector job is considered a property right. However, when you have reporters, including the NYT reporters and columnists like Peter Schrag, know nothing about civil service protections, you can’t even write intelligently about it.
Teachers aid and abet it by not even knowing themselves. Why haven’t the states and D.C. where “tenure” and seniority rights eliminated not been sued? It’s because they and their unions don’t even KNOW what the heck it is and why.
You say this stuff a lot, and you’re sort of correct up to a point, but you’re also wrong beyond that point.
First, public employees do not automatically have constitutional due process rights. They only have them if a property interest is conferred by an independent source like state law, or local law, or an express or implied contract with the government employer.
Second, where they do exist, due process rights don’t exist for “all” public employees, as you claim. For example, temporary workers, probationary employees (as designated by the applicable statutory scheme), elected officials, appointed head of agencies. There’s a specific legal analysis used to determine whether an employee has a property interest in his job.
Third, there’s a distinction between vested rights and prospective rights. A statute that purports to eliminate tenure for teachers who already have tenure may indeed be unconstitutional. As for why states that have enacted such statutes haven’t been sued, I don’t know. I suspect it’s not as simple as unions and labor lawyers being stupid. Maybe it’s a question of ripeness, i.e., if the due process violation is considered to occur only when the employee is actually subject to an adverse employment determination. Note that even if a statute was found unconstitutional on this basis, courts might not (and probably would not) strike the law down entirely. Rather they’d probably just refuse to allow the state to apply the statute retroactively to employees who already had vested due process rights.
Anyway, take this into consideration. Thanks.
Peter Schrag is wrong. If Vergara wins, it will indeed affect the education of LAUSD’s most vulnerable (poor children of color) students. TFAers right out of college with no expert teachers to mentor them!!?? Most new teachers can’t even lead a kindergarten class to lunch. Majority of principals and administrators in LAUSD have the same minimal 5 years or less classroom experience, so don’t count on them for help. Yes, this IS the civil rights movement of our time.