Freedom Line Blog

We’ve all heard horror stories about how difficult it is to fire exceptionally bad public school teachers in large urban districts.  Thanks to a chart (see below) in a new lawsuit challenging California’s teacher tenure law, now we know why.

The parties behind the lawsuit, discussed by Larry Sands in City Journal California, simply ask the California judicial system to make sure “that the policies embodied in the California Code of Education place the interests of students first and promote the goal of having an effective teacher in every classroom.”

Part of achieving that goal may involve requiring every California school district to comply with the Stull Act, a forty-year-old law that mandates using some measure of student learning outcomes in every teacher’s performance evaluation.  You won’t be shocked to discover that this law currently goes unenforced.

That is, unless the lawsuits Sands discusses are successful.  If that happens, students just might start getting the level of education so many of their parents are paying for in taxes.