THE California state government can be sued on behalf of 6.2 million pupils for presiding over squalid, ill-equipped classrooms and a chronic teacher shortage, a United States judge has ruled.

The lawsuit, brought by a coalition of civil rights groups, paints a picture of Third-World teaching conditions in America’s most populous state, the powerhouse of the global technology and entertainment industries.

The American Civil Liberties Union and other organisations allege that dilapidated, vermin-infested buildings, insufficient textbooks and a gaping shortfall of qualified teachers may affect up to 1.5 million pupils across the state’s 8,000 schools. They contend that the conditions are concentrated in schools serving black, Hispanic, Vietnamese and other ethnic- minority students in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

“Too many kids in low-income, high-minority schools don’t have what they need to learn,” said John Affeldt, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs.

The civil rights groups want California’s government to craft a masterplan to deal with alleged mismanagement across the state’s 1,100 local education authorities and to guarantee equal opportunities for all pupils.

The state does not dispute local mismanagement, but disclaims responsibility, arguing that education districts should be held accountable themselves for keeping their houses in order.

California education department spokeswoman Ann Bancroft said existing laws could be invoked to deal with many of the problems, “without creating a huge new state bureaucracy that would reduce money for classrooms”.

She accused civil rights groups of making inaccurate claims about schools and relying on anecdotal evidence. But Mr Affeldt said official figures show that 14 per cent of California’s classrooms have unqualified teachers.

California ranks 48th out of the 50 states in the latest Education Week survey of US school resources, spending $5,235 per pupil in 1999, compared with $8,332 in top-ranked West Virginia.

Eva Harris, principal at Garfield school in Oakland, one of the schools cited in the lawsuit, said she has to “beg and plead with teachers to stay”. Only 1 per cent of students at the inner-city primary school are white.

At Balboa High School in a depressed part of San Francisco, the gymnasium is out of action and an unusable cafeteria forced staff to convert classrooms into a makeshift kitchen. Assistant principal Ted Barone said the school has a very large percentage of unqualified teachers because “we are an under-performing school with a challenging population and we don’t pay enough”.

The ruling earlier this month is the latest chapter in an acrimonious and protracted legal saga.

California’s schools are expected to receive $51.6bn from state, local and federal government sources this year, a rise of 6 per cent.