Two Liberal Judges Take a Stand Against Tenure

In a victory for teachers’ unions, the California Supreme Court on Monday refused to strike down the state’s generous tenure laws -- which a lower court had said violated students’ rights to an adequate education. Significantly, the court’s 4-3 ruling didn’t break down on purely partisan lines. Two prominent liberals, each of whom could be contenders for the U.S. Supreme Court in a Hillary Clinton administration, dissented. That’s evidence of a growing divide among liberals about whether favoring teachers might actually be a bad thing for students.

In 2014, a California lower court judge struck down teacher tenure provisions as violating the state constitution. As I noted the time, California’s laws seem poorly designed, allowing tenure after just two years and even when the teacher may not be fully credentialed. Aside from the badness of the law, I criticized the judicial decision harshly for its lack of well-developed constitutional reasoning. Among other things, the court simply asserted in a single paragraph that poor schools tend to get worse teachers, and that this counts as a violation of the equal protection of the laws.