L.A. Trial for Meritless Lawsuit Seeking to Eradicate Teachers’ Professional Rights Begins Today, Wastes Taxpayers’ Dollars and Time
Lawsuit does not improve student learning and hurts students, demonizes teachers
LOS ANGELES — One day after nearly 1,000 educators denounced the Vergara v. the State of California lawsuit, opening arguments begin today in Los Angeles County Superior Court. This meritless lawsuit, which seeks to eradicate teachers’ professional rights, highlights the wrong problems, proposes the wrong solutions, and follows the wrong process while doing nothing to improve student learning. This is yet another attempt by the usual corporate special interests to undermine the teaching profession and push their agenda on California public schools and students.
The California Federation of Teachers (CFT) and the California
Teachers Association (CTA) intervened in the litigation last year
on the side of the state of California to actively participate in
the legal proceedings in support of educators and students.
“A teacher’s simple right to a hearing before dismissal is not
‘unfair’ to students. Students need a stable, experienced
teaching workforce, not a revolving door of educators,” CFT
President Joshua Pechthalt notes. “So-called ‘tenure’—that is,
the right to a hearing before dismissal—became law because
educators used to be subject to political pressures and arbitrary
decisions that threatened academic freedom and robbed teachers of
their ability to advocate for their students. If Vergara
succeeds, all students will suffer.”
Circumventing the legislative process to strip teachers of their
due process rights will not improve student learning, will make
it harder to attract and retain quality teachers in our
classrooms, and ignores all the research that shows experience is
a key factor in effective teaching. This lawsuit comes at a time
when California has the largest student to teacher ratio in the
country and ranks 50th in the nation in per pupil spending.
“The real support our students need today is adequate resources,
smaller class sizes, parental involvement and quality teacher
training,” said CTA President Dean E. Vogel. “We need to be
attracting new teachers to the field, not driving them away. This
lawsuit and trial are a waste of valuable taxpayer money that
would be much better spent actually investing in our students and
schools.”
The Vergara lawsuit is backed by a conservative Silicon Valley
millionaire and charter school proponent, David Welch, who
started a group called “Students Matter” to pursue the suit. It
also wrongly proposes that seniority rules mean that when layoffs
occur bad teachers stay and good teachers are forced to leave.
But the problem with layoffs is not seniority. The problem is the
underfunding that causes layoffs—lack of revenues, exacerbated by
the ongoing aftereffects of the economic recession. Seniority
simply provides for fair, transparent rules to administer layoffs
if they occur.
“The best way to avoid losing good teachers to layoffs is to find
the funding to prevent layoffs,” says Pechthalt. “CFT and CTA led
the campaign in 2012 to pass Proposition 30, which, by bringing
new revenues to the schools, stopped layoffs in their
tracks.”
“Not one of the Vergara backers were anywhere to be seen during
the campaign to pass Prop 30, which, by filling in part of the
hole ripped in education funding over the years, stopped layoffs
this year, and did more to support equal access to education for
all students than anything proposed in this law suit,” added
Vogel.
More background and facts about the deceptive nature of this
lawsuit are available online.
The trial is expected to take a few months.
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The 325,000-member CTA is affiliated with the 3.2 million-member
National Education Association. The California Federation of
Teachers is the statewide affiliate of the American Federation of
Teachers, and represents faculty and school employees in public
and private schools and colleges, from early childhood through
higher education.