Beatriz Vergara v. State of California

California's Education Code included a permanent-employment (tenure) statute granting tenure after just two years, dismissal statutes making it extremely slow and costly to fire even grossly ineffective tenured teachers, and a last-in-first-out (LIFO) layoff statute barring schools from considering teacher effectiveness when deciding who to lay off. Evidence showed roughly 1 to 3 percent of California teachers were grossly ineffective, and that low-income, high-minority schools disproportionately ended up with those teachers because the dismissal and LIFO statutes made it hardest to remove them from any school, and layoffs, driven purely by seniority, tended to concentrate them further in less-desirable schools. Nine public school students, including Beatriz Vergara (plaintiffs), sued the State of California (defendant), arguing these statutes together violated the state constitution's equal protection guarantee.