“License probation” often seems like a safe harbor – an acceptable and available result for a California State license-holder who has been faced with criminal charges and now must deal with the fall-out of consequences for the occupational or professional license. But in practice, license probation often operates as a black hole from which State licensees cannot emerge successfully.

In support of Value Added Analysis as the basis for evaluations of K-12 teachers, the Los Angeles Times published the names of individual teachers and rated them from good to deficient based on the performance of their students on standardized tests. The publication of this misleading information has caused genuine pain and damage in the lives of some California teachers who deserved much better treatment. And to what effect or student benefit?

Across the U.S.- now in Washington DC and possibly coming soon in Los Angeles - school districts are responding to public demand for meaningful skill-based evaluations of schoolteachers. Most districts' responses involve measuring teacher skills by testing students. This article identifies the black-letter legal issue that underlies evaluating teachers on the basis of students' test scores. Teachers and their labor representatives are well-advised to delve deeply into the law of test validation.