The Wall Street Journal
“From an amicus brief submitted June 7 to the California Supreme Court in support of the plaintiff’s petition for review in Vergara v. California, a case challenging teacher tenure in public schools; signatories include Laurence H. Tribe, Michael W. McConnell and L. Lawrence Lessig III:
The statutes at issue impair the fundamental right to education. They categorically prioritize the job security of teachers—regardless of their competence—over the educational needs, interests, and rights of California school children. They do so despite the existence of other ways, more consistent with the educational rights of the State’s schoolchildren, to protect legitimate interests in teacher job security. The upshot of handicapping the ability to efficiently identify and remove grossly ineffective teachers, and providing institutional bias in favor of incompetent teachers, is to contract the marketplace of ideas within public schools by institutionalizing educational mediocrity. The California Constitution, however, establishes public schools for the benefit of children, not teachers, and the Education Clause talks about the right to public education as ‘essential to the preservation of the rights and liberties of the people,’ not as a right essential to the economic security of the teachers selected by the State to make that right a reality.”