Court Rules Charter Operators Not “State Actors”
The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held unanimously that while charter schools are public schools, that doesn’t make the owners and operators “state actors” when it comes to the law.
This is a significant ruling because it helps define the relationship between charter schools and their employees, but we can expect more litigation because charters blur the jurisdictional lines. Charter school teachers are public employees, but a charter can’t turn KIPP or Green Dot (or the United Federation of Teachers, for that matter) into a government entity. They are private organizations subject to the laws governing the private sector.
With two sets of rules, there is a lot of room for hard cases, and we all know what hard cases make.
January 5th, 2010 at 21:20
So if a charter school had, say, mandated prayer, that wouldn’t be “the state” doing so and such prayer would thereby be legal?
January 6th, 2010 at 06:57
Well, I’m not an attorney, but I think it would be a violation of state law and the school’s charter. However, you could argue that it wouldn’t be a violation of the First Amendment.
January 11th, 2010 at 13:20
I’m retired from the practice of law so don’t take this as legal advice either but the other interesting area that this decision will affect(the first being, as in the above comments, whether constitutional protections against the government apply) is as to immunity. State actors, acting in their official capacity, enjoy significant immunity from civil suits. Presumably, if they do not enjoy state actor status, charter schools and their boards will not have those immunities, making them much more liable to suits and damages resulting therefrom. For now, of course, the decision is only binding in the 9th Circuit. We may get a Supreme Court case out of this eventually as other circuits weigh in and, inevitably, one or more disagree.