After winning a court order to improve academic conditions at one Los Angeles high school last fall, lawyers in a class action suit asked Thursday for an additional court order to compel the state to improve instruction time at five other California high schools in the 2015-16 school year.
Attorneys for teachers who are challenging the right of the California Teachers Association to force them to pay union dues petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday to hear their case this year. There’s a good chance that it will.
State finance officials last week granted the California Department of Education $3.4 million to fight a lawsuit that demands the state fix disruptive conditions in some high-poverty schools where students allegedly are being denied the fundamental right to an education.
Jefferson High School in Los Angeles – where some students waited two months for their class schedules and were assigned to classes with no content, given menial administrative tasks or sent home early – may be an extreme example of lost instructional time but it is not an isolated case, according to a class-action lawsuit.
A state judge Wednesday ordered the California Department of Education to intervene at a south Los Angeles high school where some students have spent eight weeks in classes during which they received no instruction.
A lawsuit working its way through the courts is striking at the core of the California Teachers Association’s power: its authority to automatically deduct hundreds of millions of dollars a year in dues from the paychecks of both members and non-members.
