John Deasy, Superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), testified that the statutes harmed students.

[10] The final challenged statute dictates how district administrators prioritize which teachers are to be laid off if they were to reduce the size of their teaching staff.

On June 10, 2014, the court ruled that the statutes at issue produced disparities that "shock the conscience"[11] and violate the equal protection clause of the California Constitution.

here this Court is directly faced with issues that compel it to apply these constitutional principles to the quality of the educational experience.

[15] School administrators asked the judge to review a copy of "California Standards for the Teaching Profession" (2009 Edition) as evidence.

The court pointed out that the opening sentence of those Standards state: "A growing body of research confirms that the quality of teaching is what matters most for the students' development and learning in schools."

The court agreed, concluding that "such time and cost constraints cause districts in many cases to be very reluctant to even commence dismissal procedures.

"[26] California's LIFO-only layoff statute required "the last-hired teacher [to be] the statutorily-mandated first-fired one when lay-offs occur.

[33] Welch is the founder of a nonprofit education reform organization called Students Matter through which the plaintiffs' attorney's fees were paid.

[34] The plaintiff school students' trial experts included a group of economists who examined various aspects of teacher effectiveness under "value-added modeling".

Plaintiff rebuttal testimony was provided by Eric Hanushek and by Dr. Anthony Smith, former superintendent of the Oakland Unified School District.

Jesse Rothstein of the University of California, Berkeley, testified that tenure restrictions served the interest of student achievement.

Soon after the trial court's ruling was issued it was appealed by California Governor Jerry Brown, who reasoned that "[c]hanges of this magnitude, as a matter of law and policy, require appellate review.

revealed deplorable staffing decisions being made by some local administrators that have a deleterious impact on poor and minority students.

schoolchildren throughout California, our transparent and reasoned judgment on whether the challenged statutes deprive a significant subset of students of their fundamental right to education and violate the constitutional guarantee of equal protection of the laws.

"[52][53] Additionally, Justice Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar wrote that he and his fellow justices should have had the opportunity to determine if the flaws highlighted in the Vergara case amounted only to "the usual blemishes in governance left as institutions implement statutes or engage in routine trade-offs [or if they were] staggering failures that threaten to turn the right to education for California schoolchildren into an empty promise.

reducing class sizes, promoting and strengthening peer assistance and review, and reinforcing collaborative district practices with a proven record of success.

"[65] After the California Supreme Court's denial of review effectively upheld the validity of those same statutes, the leaders of the Students Matter group that initiated and funded the lawsuit signaled that the next battles might be legislative: "The Supreme Court’s decision places the responsibility for improving the state’s teacher retention, evaluation and dismissal laws squarely with the California Legislature.

"[67] In the days after the California Supreme Court denied review, leading newspapers in California's two largest metropolitan areas (Los Angeles and San Francisco) published editorials which called on the state's legislature and teachers unions to address the issues raised in the Vergara case.

The Los Angeles Times acknowledged that labor statutes protecting teachers may not be the most significant contributors to the educational difficulties encountered by California's students.

Nonetheless, the Times Editorial Board concluded that "California’s tenure and seniority laws do tend to protect the worst teachers at the expense of students.

The Legislature, always too obliging to the desires of the teachers unions, must gather its strength on behalf of the state’s children to reform bad laws.

"[68] The San Francisco Chronicle also reproved California's teachers unions for keeping "profoundly rigid rules that protect incompetent classroom instructors and harm low-income students."

Like the Times, the editors at the Chronicle asserted that it should be "the Legislature [that overhauls] the tenure rules," but they also noted that "teacher groups are among California’s biggest political spenders and have gutted past efforts at addressing these educational inequities.