According to the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, no state may “deprive a person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” (Alexander and Alexander, 2005, p. 435) This clause refers to public schools and does not provide sufficient procedural requirements that each public school should satisfy while dismissing a teacher.
Specifically, the due process does not explain why a teacher should be dismissed but provides the procedures that should be followed by a school to dismiss a teacher. The clause due process, therefore, is not relevant to use because it does not provide a sufficient basis for protecting teacher’s rights.
The provisions presented in the Fourteenth Amendment are not congruent with those provided by the state of Texas. In this regard, Walsh, Kemerer, and Laurie (2010) state that a teacher must at least “be advised of the cause or cause of the termination in sufficient detail to fairly enable him or her to show any error that may exist…” and “be given an opportunity for a hearing before a tribunal that both possesses some academic expertise and has an apparent impartiality toward the charges” (p. 139).
In this regard, the Texas school board plans to organize an independent hearing system for teacher’s fair dismissal, which would embrace all elements of the due process required by the courts. From the statements above, it can be explicitly seen that dismissal regulations in Texas are much more consistent and specific as compared with the Fourteenth Amendment.