If the objective is to teach, why is senority the critical factor?
This past week Gov. Brian Sandoval said he intends to cut state spending on public schools by 5 percent.
Will that mean pay cuts for teachers? Will that result in teacher layoffs? Those decisions will have to be made by the administrators in each county.
If push comes to layoffs, will our teachers and their union learn from the mistakes of others?
In December the L.A. Times reported on what happened to one Los Angeles middle school when the school district took the easy way out.
Liechty Middle School opened in 2007 in a poor neighborhood, but with a team of teachers with a mission to improve. By the end of the first year, scores on standardized tests showed the most improvement in English among all the district middle schools and was in the top 10 in math, according to the newspaper’s analysis.
In 2009 the budget crunch came and half those teachers had to be laid off.
What was the sole criterion for which teacher got laid off? Seniority, of course. Which meant that districtwide many of the young, energetic and effective teachers, according to those test scores, were ousted in favor of those who had managed to hang around longer.
As a specific example, the Times reported, Liechty fell from first in English improvement to 61st and fell out of the top 10 in math improvement.
Overall the paper found in an analysis of 1,000 elementary and middle school teachers for whom test results were available, “Because seniority is largely unrelated to performance, the district has laid off hundreds of its most promising math and English teachers. About 190 ranked in the top fifth in raising scores and more than 400 ranked in the top 40%.”
More importantly, the paper concluded, “Far fewer teachers would be laid off if the district were to base the cuts on performance rather than seniority. The least experienced teachers also are the lowest-paid, so more must be laid off to meet budgetary targets. An estimated 25% more teachers would have kept their jobs if L.A. Unified had based its cuts on teachers' records in improving test scores.”
Similar data on how teachers’ students improve under their tutelage is available to the administrators in Clark County. Will we learn from the experience of others? Or keep making the same old decisions because they are easy?
