CALIFORNIA SUPREME COURT UNLIKELY TO GRANT REVIEW OF VERGARA REVERSAL

Campbell Brown’s LA School Report’s lead was: “The day after the state Court of Appeal ruled that the job protections for teachers do not predominantly harm minority students, the key players in the case said they feel confident the California Supreme Court will take up the issue.” | http://bit.ly/1r7RO2N

“The key players?"   Really?

THERECORDER, which bills itself as California's leading news and analysis publication at the global crossroads of the legal, business, and technology trends shaping law practice today, reports:

Michael Rubin of Altshuler Berzon, who represented the unions, said that the Supreme Court was unlikely to grant a review of the decision, which he said applied well-settled law to a fundamentally flawed set of arguments.

“It’s just basic, black-letter constitutional law that the equal protection clause only applies where there has been a classification between two similarly situated groups,” Rubin said. | http://bit.ly/1WaF9aK

CALIF. APPEALS COURT REJECTS RULING ON TEACHER TENURE

By Ben Hancock, The Recorder | http://bit.ly/1WaF9aK

Updated 4/14/16, 6:50 p.m.  ::  SAN FRANCISCO ­— A landmark decision striking down California’s teacher tenure laws for subjecting economically disadvantaged students to “grossly ineffective teachers” has been reversed by a state appeals court.

The Second District Court of Appeal ruled on Thursday that lawyers for the student-plaintiffs had failed to establish that the challenged statutes violate the state constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law.

“Although the statutes may lead to the hiring and retention of more ineffective teachers than a hypothetical alternative system would,” Presiding Justice Roger Boren wrote for a unanimous panel, it is decisions of administrators, not teacher protection laws, that funnel less competent teachers to schools serving poor and minority students.

“Critically, plaintiffs 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,” Boren wrote.

The decision is an upset for the Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher lawyers who prevailed after a two-month bench trial before Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Rolf Treu. It may also reverberate in other parts of the country, as the California case sparked a similar challenge of tenure laws in New York.

There were heavyweights on both sides in the litigation. In addition to Gibson Dunn partner Theodore Boutrous, the case had the financial backing of Students Matter, a nonprofit founded by Silicon Valley entrepreneur David Welch. On the other side was California’s Justice Department and a team from Altshuler Berzon representing the state’s powerful teachers unions.

Boutrous was defiant in a statement reacting to the decision Thursday.

“We came to court to defend the rights of California’s public school students and will continue to do so, despite today’s temporary setback,” he said, arguing that the appeals court had failed to recognize how the laws at issue “shackle school districts and impose severe and irreparable harm on students.”

“We are disappointed by the Court of Appeal’s decision today, but expect that the California Supreme Court will have the final say,” Boutrous added.

Michael Rubin of Altshuler Berzon, who represented the unions, said that the Supreme Court was unlikely to grant a review of the decision, which he said applied well-settled law to a fundamentally flawed set of arguments.

“It’s just basic, black-letter constitutional law that the equal protection clause only applies where there has been a classification between two similarly situated groups,” Rubin said.

The students had argued in Vergara v. California that various parts of the California Education Code protected incompetent teachers and denied certain “unlucky” groups of students their right to an education.

Under the code, for example, teachers are granted tenure and made “permanent” after two years, and are granted a lengthy review process if the administration seeks to terminate them. This makes it harder to fire ineffective teachers, the students claimed, subjecting some—and especially economically disadvantaged students—to a poor education.

But the Second District panel ruled that the plaintiffs had failed to show that the laws themselves actually discriminate between identifiable groups, which it said its a prerequisite to show that a law violates the equal protection clause.

The court also concluded that the negative impacts felt by students were not “inevitable” based on the statute, but based on how the laws were implemented by school administrators.

The decision reverses the 2014 ruling by Treu, who found that all five elements of the education code challenged by the plaintiffs were unconstitutional.