STOP THE PRESSES! Along with Race to the Top and the upcoming battle over the renewal of NCLB/ESEA, the biggest education story of the year is teacher layoffs – in particular, HOW the layoffs are done. Doing them solely by seniority is a crime of the highest order against children (especially low-income, minority children), taking many effective teachers away from them and replacing them with ineffective teachers. (This isn't to say less experienced teachers are better than more experienced ones – in fact, experience matters, especially in the first few years – but I AM saying that seniority is an extremely crude tool and the inevitable result of layoffs strictly by seniority is keeping many lousy teachers and firing many superstars – many states' Teachers of the Year have been (or are about to be) laid off).

Thus, this court ruling in LA is HUGE! A lawsuit charged that seniority-based layoffs would have a disproportionate impact on low-income, minority students and thus violated the California constitution's right to equal educational opportunity – and a judge agreed! Here are two short blurbs and below is an LA Times article about it:

A Los Angeles County Superior Court judge has halted plans by the L.A. school district to lay off teachers to meet state budget cuts, issuing an injunction that pronounces the layoffs a violation of students' rights under the California constitution to a quality education.

A class action suit was filed in February 2010 by students at three Los Angeles middle schools who alleged that one round of layoffs had already stripped their schools of many teachers, and that another planned round would devastate the quality of their education. The Los Angeles Unified School District and the State of California were among those named as defendants.

The plaintiffs were represented pro bono by a team of lawyers from law firm Morrison & Foerster, as well as by the local chapter of the ACLU. Sean Gates, a partner in Morrison & Foerster's Los Angeles office, was co-lead counsel for the plaintiffs and is available to comment on the case.

"Our case was so strong that the Governor and the State Board of Education, defendants in the case, agreed with our position," Mr. Gates said.

While California law permits teacher layoffs to start with the least-experienced teachers, Judge William F. Highberger wrote in his injunction order, the law is also constructed to protect the right to educational quality and opportunity.

"The Legislature clearly qualified teachers' interests in seniority-based layoffs to accommodate constitutional equal protection interests," said the judge.

A copy of the injunction can be accessed here: http://www.rippmedia.com/Reed.RevisedPreliminaryInjunction.pdf

Further detail follows below. Please be in touch if you would like to learn more about the case through a conversation with Mr. Gates.

James Bourne 212 262-7470 jimbournenyc@aol.com
Joshua Spivak 510 849-1663 jspivaknyc@aol.com
Allan Ripp 646 285-1779 arippnyc@aol.com (after hours)

Morrison & Foerster Secures Victory for Inner-City Students in Los Angeles Unified School District

LOS ANGELES (May 13, 2010) – Morrison & Foerster LLP, along with co-counsel from the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California and the Public Counsel Law Center, yesterday won a preliminary injunction protecting the constitutional right to equal educational opportunity for students at three inner-city public schools in Los Angeles Unified School District ("LAUSD"). The preliminary injunction issued by Judge William Highberger in Los Angeles Superior Court will stop a second round of teacher layoffs at these schools and push the State and LAUSD to make changes to prevent budget-based layoffs from disproportionately affecting the most challenged schools.

In response to State budget cuts in the 650,000-student district – the nation's second largest – LAUSD laid off thousands of teachers in 2009 and is in the process of laying off thousands more in 2010. The reductions, however, were not evenly spread through the district. Plaintiffs' schools were the hardest hit. In 2009, LAUSD sent Reduction in Force ("RIF") notices to 60% of the teachers at Liechty, 48% at Gompers, and 46% at Markham. Many other LAUSD middle schools had less than 15% of their teachers laid off. In 2010, LAUSD was set to lay off 49% of the teachers at Liechty, 21% at Gompers, and 30% at Markham. At the same time, over 30 of the 69 LAUSD middle schools would lose less than 10% of their teachers. The layoffs at Plaintiffs schools decimated the teaching corps and prevented the delivery of equal educational opportunity. As Judge Highberger's order states, "The evidence shows that in many of Plaintiffs' classes, little to no instruction took place." He also noted that "LAUSD submitted no evidence rebutting Plaintiffs' showing of the horrible experiences of certain students at Plaintiffs' schools in recent months," and he relied on "evidence that students have missed and will miss critical instruction in core academic subjects."

Although defendants in the case, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and the State Board of Education supported the issuance of the preliminary injunction to protect the constitutional rights of the students at the three schools.

"We are extremely pleased with the outcome. This historic decision will help protect the constitutional right of all California public school students to receive equal educational opportunity," said Morrison & Foerster partner Sean Gates.

-----------------------