Why this history strengthens the legislative case for reform
By Scott Douglas, Southern California Regional Representative
The finding, in plain language
California’s community colleges run on part-time faculty. More than 40% of credit teaching has been done by instructors classified as “temporary” — and has been for over two decades. The label does not match the work: it is continuing and permanent, not short-term. Yet because the law calls these instructors temporary, they are denied what permanent status would carry — a path to tenure, job security, and equal pro-rata pay for the same teaching. That unfairness is, at present, essentially the only argument the one-tier movement has. The usual assumption is that the Legislature built the two-tier system on purpose — weighing cost and flexibility against fairness, and choosing flexibility.
That assumption is wrong. The system was never designed — it is the byproduct of three things no legislator ever voted for:
1. A time-limited rule, read as permanent. A 1967 statute classified faculty teaching 60% or less of a full load as “temporary,” but limited that temporary status to two semesters within any three years. Read as written, an instructor whose work continued past that point had to be converted to a permanent, tenure-track position — or let go. The Legislature wrote a time-limited temporary category, not a permanent underclass.
2. A court that read the time limit out. In 1979, the California Supreme Court (the Peralta decision) held that the two-semester limit did not apply to part-time faculty — and with the limit gone, “temporary” status had no endpoint. Nothing in the statute authorized that; the word the Legislature used was “temporary.”
3. A drafting accident that erased the pay right. A 1976 recodification quietly dropped the requirement that reclassified part-timers be paid pro rata, moving it into a K–12-only section with no community college equivalent — even though state law says recodification is not supposed to change anyone’s rights.
The result is a workforce doing permanent work under a temporary label. In the fifty years since, the Legislature has never gone back to ask whether the foundation was sound. Instead it built workaround after workaround — the 75/25 goal, the Faculty Obligation Number, parity-pay funding, office-hour funding, rehire rights, health-care reimbursement — none of which fixed the underlying structure, and the 75/25 goal has never been met statewide.
Why this reframes the one-tier movement
Start with what this does not do. It does not make reform cheaper. What it changes is the Legislature’s willingness to carry the cost — by recasting the question from “should we fund a costly new benefit?” to “should we pay to fix a mistake no one voted for?” The value is acceptance, not savings.
That fairness argument — the movement’s only one — is true: the two-tier system is unjust, part-time faculty deserve security and parity, and the Legislature should change its policy to provide them. On its own, it has not been enough. This paper supplies a second and, in legislative terms, stronger argument. The ask is no longer “change your policy.” It is “correct a mistake you never made.” That shift matters in three concrete ways.
It removes the strongest defense of the status quo. Districts and skeptics can argue the two-tier system reflects a deliberate, reasonable trade-off between cost and faculty security. If no Legislature ever enacted that trade-off — if it came from a court misreading and a clerical error — that defense disappears. The burden flips: the question becomes why an unintended judicial reading should be allowed to stand.
It names a precise target — though the fix is not a single sentence. The error has a specific location: the two-semester limit the court read out of Education Code § 87482.5. The movement can point to exactly what went wrong, which is stronger than arguing the system in the abstract. But naming the error is not a one-sentence cure, and it must not be presented as one. Restoring the limit and nothing else would push districts to churn the positions — cycling new temporary hires through them rather than converting the incumbents — displacing the very people the reform exists to protect. A workable remedy has to restore the limit going forward, convert and protect the incumbent faculty rather than displace them, and restore the equal-pay mandate the 1976 recodification dropped. The reframe sharpens the target; it does not shrink the bill.
It changes who looks like the radical. Under the fairness frame, advocates are asking for something new and expensive. Under this frame, advocates are asking to restore the statute’s original meaning, and it is the status quo that rests on an error nobody voted for. “Put the law back the way it was written” is a more durable legislative posture than “grant us something new.”
What it does — and does not — change
This frame changes the legitimacy of the argument, not the arithmetic. The cheap moment to fix it passed between 1979 and 1988, while reliance on temporary staffing was still shallow. After fifty years of accumulated dependence on inexpensive part-time labor across 73 districts, the cost of conversion today is unknown but likely substantial. The reframe will not make that number smaller.
What it does is strip away the cover for inaction. The Legislature can no longer treat the status quo as a considered choice it is entitled to leave alone. It is a correctable error with a known origin and a mounting price tag — the Roberts settlement, an $18 million payout to part-time faculty at a single district, being one early installment. That is the case the one-tier movement can now make: not “give us a new system,” but “restore the one the statute already described — before the price of leaving it broken grows again.”
This is a synthesis of the full paper, Nobody Ever Voted for This, which sets out the full legal record and citations. For a copy, contact Scott Douglas at sdouglas@cpfa.org.