What We Know about Vergara and Teacher Quality

On Tuesday, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge ruled in favor of the plaintiffs in Vergara v. California, a case that was brought to the court by nine students–and Students Matter, a national non-profit–and challenged a number of California’s teacher labor laws. What does this actually mean? Well, no one is exactly sure.
The description of Vergara on the Students Matter website lists three main areas in
which the decision should allow significant changes: the abbreviated time after which teachers are granted permanent employment, the significant challenges involved in dismissing teachers, and the “Last-In, First-Out” policy (shared by many other states and districts), which requires layoff decisions to be based primarily on seniority, as opposed to teacher quality or other factors. Echoing concerns voiced by a growing number of politicians and reformers in recent years, the organization argues that these policies enable ineffective teachers to stay in classrooms long after they should be identified and forced to leave. For Students Matter and many other organizations, this case is a breakthrough in that it gives constitutional support to charter models and new teacher evaluation systems that require teachers to demonstrate their quality in order to keep their jobs.
Just as prevalent, however, is the view that Vergara, and the policy movement with which it is aligned, are indicative of a trend towards the “privatization” of education. Many see changes in teacher labor laws as reforms that fail to address other potentially more important sources of educational inequality and ineffectiveness–e.g., low teacher pay, funding disparities, poverty, or neighborhood violence. While there is some validity to these arguments, they neglect a substantial body of research suggesting that teacher quality is among the most important determinants of long-term outcomes for students. Harvard economics professor Raj Chetty, who testified for the plaintiffs in Vergara, has published one of the most well-known studies on this topic.
Where there exists a less reliable body of literature is on the subject of teacher unions and teacher labor laws. Multiple decades have passed since the last major reform wave in teacher labor policy (the acquisition of collective bargaining by a number of unions in the 1960s-80s), and recent changes are too new for strong evidence to exist on their impacts. This means that neither the plaintiffs nor the defendants in Vergara have exactly the right idea: teacher quality does matter, but it isn’t clear that more stringent employment requirements will actually improve the overall quality of teaching. Job security is an employment incentive, and while removing tenure may make it easier to fire ineffective teachers, it could easily make it more challenging to hire effective teachers, particularly in low-income areas where the removal of job security is unlikely to be accompanied by an alternative incentive such as an increase in pay .
Regardless of its impacts on teacher quality, Vergara sets an important precedent in its ruling that teacher labor laws violate the civil rights of students. This principle could just as easily be used to challenge a number of other common practices in education, including, but not limited to, funding through property taxes or de facto socioeconomic segregation. Teacher quality is not the only educational condition that varies based on clearly observable demographics, and this decision is likely to be invoked in multiple other policy debates.
It may be too soon to say whether or how Vergara will impact students directly, but it’s clear that times have changed.