Houston Federation of Teachers, Local 2415 v. Houston Independent School District

AMENDED SUMMARY JUDGMENT OPINION

Stephen Wm. Smith, United States Magistrate Judge

This case presents a matter of first impression in this circuit—the use of privately developed algorithms to terminate public school teachers for ineffective performance. Of course, an. employer’s impulse to quantify employee performance is neither new1 nor inherently objectionable. The difficulty, as this case illustrates, is the tension between the understandable secrecy surrounding proprietary algorithms developed by private commercial enterprises, on the one hand, and the Fourteenth Amendment due process…