Judge: Stripping veteran teachers of tenure rights unconstitutional

by Laura Leslie, WRAL, May 16, 2014.

A Superior Court judge on Friday struck down a law requiring veteran teachers to surrender their tenure rights in exchange for multi-year contracts.

Judge Robert Hobgood ruled that the law, passed last year as a provision in the state budget, violates the contract clause of the U.S. Constitution and amounts to an illegal taking of property under the state constitution. He issued a permanent injunction against the law and denied the state's request to stay his ruling pending an appeal.

Teachers with tenure, officially called career status, are given extra due process rights, including the right to a hearing if they are disciplined or fired.

Lawmakers called on school districts to identify the top 25 percent of their teachers and offer them new four-year contracts with $500 annual salary increases. In exchange, those teachers would lose their career status protections. The provision aims to move North Carolina to a performance-based system for paying teachers instead of one based on longevity.

The North Carolina Association of Educators sued in December to halt the law, arguing that the state couldn't arbitrarily take away the tenure rights teachers had worked to earn.

Attorneys for the state argued that the law provides school districts with more flexibility in trying to attract and retain the best teachers. Career status, they said, makes it harder to get mediocre teachers out of the classroom.

Hobgood ruled that the contract requirement "was not reasonable and necessary to serve an important public purpose" and provided school districts "no discernible, workable standards" for picking the teachers who would receive the new contracts.

"The contractual obligation is present with each public school teacher who has already been awarded career status and has an existing career contract with that teacher’s board of education,” Hobgood said. "The state’s action ... would impair that contract.”

Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger, who crafted the provision to end tenure, called the ruling "a classic case of judicial activism" and said lawmakers would work to appeal the decision.

"Today, a single Wake County judge suppressed the will of voters statewide who elected representatives to improve public education and reward our best teachers with raises," Berger said in an email.

A Guilford County judge likewise ruled last month that the tenure law violated the state and federal constitutions. But that ruling applied only to Guilford County Schools and Durham Public Schools, which had filed a separate lawsuit.

Although Hobgood ruled that the state cannot retroactively strip tenure rights from teachers who have earned it, he dismissed a teacher who hadn't yet earned tenure as a plaintiff in the case, leaving open the possibility that lawmakers could prevent teachers from earning tenure in the future.

http://www.wral.com/judge-stripping-veteran-teachers-of-tenure-rights-unconstitutional/13650846/