The first two years for California teachers are make-or-break.

For their first two years, new teachers in California can be dismissed at will. After two years of employment, however, teachers in most districts enjoy strong due process protections commonly referred to as tenure. As a practical matter, districts need to make a decision in about 18 months whether to employ a teacher as a permanent member of the faculty.

California's tenure policy is unusually quick. Most US states require three years and evidence of competence.

As described in Lesson 3.2, demand for teachers is cyclical. When the stock market rises and budgets increase, California experiences teacher shortages. In those conditions school districts can find it hard to be picky about teacher candidates. They hire while they can.

Whenever hard times hit the stock market, by contrast, California's budget falls. Budget pressure leads to a flurry of springtime pink slips, the common name for a required notice sent to teachers when their position cannot be guaranteed. Seniority is usually the key element for determining the pecking order, at minimum as a tie-breaker.

Reforms that affect tenure usually seek to delay it, or make it conditional on evidence of good work. There have been multiple attempts. Other reforms seek to reduce the role of seniority as a factor in layoffs or forced placements, or to streamline the steps involved in dismissing teachers.

Dismissals for cause are rare

Teacher unions protect their members from dismissal, partly through due process requirements.

Teacher dismissals for cause are quite rare in California, even in cases of egregious misconduct. Because the process of firing a teacher is difficult, time consuming, and uncertain, principals sometimes use a more expedient solution: they make a deal. If a poorly-performing teacher agrees to move to another school, the principal agrees to give her or him a satisfactory rating. This practice, known as the dance of the lemons, is colorfully derided in Davis Guggenheim’s 2010 film Waiting for Superman.

In a layoff, who gets fired?

Last hired, first fired.

Districts, in negotiation with their unions and within the constraints of employment law, set their own policies for what happens when layoffs are likely or unavoidable. Each year, by March 15, districts issue pink slips (layoff notices) to certificated employees (mostly teachers) that need to consider their alternatives. In 2022, the legislature extended this requirement beyond teachers to include classified employees, which means that a legal process is required to lay off just about anyone who works in public education.

In most districts, the teachers most recently hired are the first let go, regardless of what they teach or how amazing they are. But it doesn't have to be that way. Within the bounds of employment law, districts have leeway; for example, some districts can make a case that special education teachers are protected.

Seniority-based layoff policies are also known as last-hired-first-fired or last-in-first-out (LIFO) policies.

Education Trust West explained the impact of seniority-based employment rules coherently in its report Victims of the Churn. The report criticizes "bumping" rights with particular vigor (see graphic).

California's larged teachers union, CTA, has taken the position that seniority is the least unfair option, protecting teachers from dismissal for "arbitrary, unfair or unjustifiable reasons." The union rejects the term tenure for seniority preferences in layoffs.

The use of seniority as a factor in teacher dismissal came sharply into question in the lean budget year of 2010. Focusing on data in Los Angeles Unified, the ACLU argued that seniority-based provisions had a disparate impact on students in poverty in low-performing schools. After four years of negotiations, the case was settled and 37 schools received additional funds for teacher training.

Some advocates had hoped for a broader set of changes. In 2012, a series of lawsuits (Vergara, Robles-Wong and CQE) sought to broadly strike down tenure and seniority practices in California state law. The suits attracted a great deal of interest, but ultimately failed to bring about change. A three-judge panel didn't dispute that "deplorable staffing decisions being made by some local administrators… have a deleterious impact on poor and minority students in California’s public schools", but concluded that laws regarding tenure and seniority did not "inevitably" cause this impact.

Inevitable harm might be impossible to prove, but that's essentially the standard that the court applied to itself in deciding the case. "The court is without power to strike down the challenged statutes. The court’s job is merely to determine whether the statutes are constitutional, not if they are 'a good idea'.”

In practice, the court kicked the can to the legislature, or future courts, to address the unequal damage caused by layoff policies. The underlying policies that allow the "deplorable staffing decisions" remain in place.

Updated September 2018
December 2021
September 2022