The second battle in the well-funded war against job protections for school teachers was won last week by teachers. The Washington Post’s Emma Brown  explains that a California appeals court on Thursday overturned the Vergara lawsuit and “upheld the state’s laws regarding teacher tenure, dismissal and layoffs, handing a major victory to teachers unions.”

Last week’s “ruling reverses a lower court’s 2014 decision that found after a 10-week trial that job protection statutes for teachers had created illegal inequalities: Poor and minority children were more likely to be saddled with ineffective teachers who were difficult to fire. The plaintiffs in the case presented a new civil rights argument against teacher tenure laws, and when it was successful, it was widely expected to be the first of many similar legal challenges in other states.” In their lawsuit, plaintiffs had alleged that job protections for teachers caused the poorest children to be…