JACK O'CONNELL v. THE SUPERIOR COURT Part II 08:14:2006
JACK O'CONNELL v. THE SUPERIOR COURT
Filed 8/11/06
CERTIFIED FOR PUBLICATION
IN THE COURT OF APPEAL OF THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA
FIRST APPELLATE DISTRICT
DIVISION FOUR
JACK O'CONNELL, as Superintendent of Public Instruction etc., et al.,
Petitioners,
v.
THE SUPERIOR COURT OF ALAMEDA COUNTY,
Respondent;
LILIANA VALENZUELA et al.,
Real Parties in Interest.
A113933
(Alameda County
Super. Ct. No. JCCP 4468)
Story continue from Part I ……..
Plaintiffs' answer to this point is to argue that students can simply refer prospective employers to the fact that their diplomas contain an annotation attesting to their passage of the CAHSEE, as a way to dissipate any inference that they might have been granted their diplomas without passing the exit exam. This response underscores one of the pernicious effects of the trial court's injunction, by emphasizing that students who obtain their diplomas by court order, without passing the CAHSEE, will remain in a distinct disadvantaged group, stigmatized forever by their own unannotated diplomas.
As important as the CAHSEE may be to socially disadvantaged students who pass the exit exam, it is of equal importance to plaintiffs who have not passed. The second goal of the CAHSEE is to identify those students who lack the education needed to achieve even the minimal level of proficiency demanded by the exit exam, and to target them for remedial instruction. (See Stats. 1999, 1st Ex. Sess. 1999-2000, ch. 1, § 2 [amending § 37252, subd. (a), in conjunction with adoption of CAHSEE, to provide that summer school instructional programs are to be offered to pupils â€
Description
Where trial court granted a preliminary injunction prohibiting schools from withholding diplomas from students who failed to pass the high school exit exam but met all other graduation requirements. The trial court's determination that plaintiffs were likely to prevail on their primary equal protection claim--that it is a violation of the equal protection clause of the California Constitution to apply the exit exam diploma requirement to students who have passed all the course requirements for graduation but who have not been provided with the educational resources necessary to enable them to pass the exam--was supported by substantial evidence and legally proper. Although the court's determination as to their secondary claim--that the manner in which supplemental funding for remedial instruction for the class of 2006 had been distributed also violated equal protection--was not. The trial court abused its discretion in the manner in which it balanced the factors it was legally required to consider in deciding a motion for preliminary injunction--and in concluding that the injunction was necessary to maintain the status quo while the underlying litigation proceeded--where trial court gave virtually no weight to schools' proof that at least in some cases, students' failure to pass exam would only result in a delay in their receipt of their high school diplomas rather than a permanent denial of them. In addition, students have nine options available to them by which they can continue their education and obtain either a high school diploma or a similar certificate. Court failed to consider evidence establishing that granting the relief students sought would cause substantial harm to others and--more significantly--to the public interest and failed to balance that harm against that which the students would suffer without the relief and where it was based on the false premise that the harm to plaintiffs was not the loss of educational opportunity but the denial of a diploma, and failed to take into account the public interest in enforcing the exam requirement as an integral part of the statutory scheme adopted by the legislature in an effort to raise academic standards in California public schools. The remedy exceeded what the court had the legal authority to impose and was otherwise overbroad in its scope where it prohibited every school district in the state, regardless of educational materials available to its students, from denying diplomas to those students who failed to pass the exam, and where so-called interim relief, an order that students be given diplomas, in fact does not maintain the status quo of the litigation but ends it.
