Via Reason Magazine:
Back in 2012, nine California students with the help of activist group Students Matter sued the state of California and several of its education agencies, claiming that various state statutes defending teachers’ perquisites made education so bad for students that it amounted to a violation of their state-constitution granted right to a public education.
The challenged policies regarded how hard it is to fire bad teachers, and seniority rules that dictate that when teachers are let go, performance isn’t considered in the decision.
The end result, as the aggrieved students argued in an early court filing in Vergara v. California, is that “school districts are forced to place failing teachers—those who are often well known to be either unable or unwilling to perform their jobs in even a minimally satisfactory manner—in classrooms where they perform miserably year after year in teaching California’s students. Students taught by these grossly ineffective teachers are missing out on half or more of the learning that students taught by average teachers receive in a school year, leaving them far behind their peers and placing the quality of the rest of their lives in jeopardy.“
But unions matter more than kids. #ForTheKids — right.