A court ruling against teacher tenure laws was overdue, mostly because it is so obvious that tenure rules can have adverse effects on students by shielding the worst of teachers from dismissal.

Well, such a ruling recently came around from the Superior Court of California, and while it surely will be appealed, it has the appearance of a slam dunk that could lead to similar challenges in other states.

The premise of the case was that California’s poor and minority students were disproportionately harmed by the state’s tenure laws, and they have been deprived of a constitutional right to an equal education. Sound familiar? School funding systems were widely challenged for a couple of decades, including here in Montana, with a similar argument.

In this case, the judge found three major problematic areas with California’s tenure laws.

He found that the plaintiffs proved that the statutes resulted in permanent employment, with “grossly ineffective teachers” obtaining jobs for life.

He upheld arguments that the state’s dismissal statutes for teachers went far beyond providing due process and instead provided for an “uber due process” that is “so complex, time consuming and expensive as to make effective, efficient yet fair dismissal of a grossly ineffective teacher illusory.”

He also upheld arguments against the state’s “Last In, First Out” statutes that require veteran teachers to be kept and new teachers to be dismissed when layoffs are necessary.

Supporters of that concept, the judge noted, have a burden to explain positive impacts of separating students from competent teachers while retaining incompetent teachers

The combined effect of the laws also resulted in incompetent teachers being rotated from one job to the next, rather than being dismissed, and those teachers often ended up teaching poor and minority students.

 Teachers union officials predictably howled in protest over the ruling, arguing that what’s needed is “full and fair funding” for schools, as if paying horrible teachers more would improve things.

Nope. What this case laid bare is the problems that can arise from tenure systems.

Fortunately, tenure laws vary from state to state, and Montana’s laws, although not perfect, are more defensible and flexible.

For example, California granted tenure if a teacher was deemed competent after just 18 months on the job. Montana teachers can’t get tenure until they’ve worked three years, giving administrators more time to evaluate them.

Montana also doesn’t have Last-In, First-Out policies. While Montana tenure laws do provide protections to teachers, we doubt that dismissing them for cause is as impossible as the judge described under the California dismissal laws.

There are reasons tenure systems came about; namely that teachers need protections. Whether it be protection from the whims of school boards that can be stacked with people who don’t like certain types of education, or from zealous parents hell-bent on getting a teacher fired for no justifiable cause, the reasons for tenure start to add up.

But there has to be a balance, and a key to providing that is sound management and oversight. Administrators need to do everything they can to weed out potentially bad teachers before tenure is granted. And perhaps there could be improvements, such as establishing periodic reviews of teacher tenure status to protect students from teachers who become “grossly ineffective” over a long period of time, for what could be many reasons.

Surely, teachers unions would resist such a change. But the whole goal should be to protect both teachers and students without having a tenure system devolve in the way that California’s has, as proven in court.