Effectiveness, Not Seniority: Keeping the Best Teachers

Speaking of the insanity of layoffs by seniority, (posted at: www.edtrust.org/west/publication/effectiveness-not-seniority-keeping-the-best-teachers-in-high-need-schools) is a four-page report by Ed Trust West about this. A very interesting finding: that the worst schools don’t have teachers with meaningfully less average experience, but the distribution of experience is quite different: they have many more rookie teachers AND many more teachers at the end of their careers. I’d never seen this data before.




I’ll give you three guesses what the research shows about when teachers are LEAST effective? First and foremost in the first two years, but also in the last years. In other words, schools serving the most disadvantaged students are used as dumping grounds for burned out teachers who are punching the clock until their pension kicks in…



Here’s the conclusion, where Ed Trust West argues that:



Protecting effective teachers is possible now, even under current state law.



Although the state education code now requires basing layoffs on seniority, it also allows districts to deviate from this process in two cases: (1) to protect employees with special training and experience and are teaching specialized courses and (2) to maintain or achieve equal protection under the law.vii



In the first case, some districts have chosen to retain individuals who hold math, science, special education, or bilingual, cross-cultural, language and academic development (BCLAD) credentials as a ―particular kind of service‖ and skip them in the seniority-based layoff process. Within this context, districts should be able to identify a class of ―Highly Effective, High-Need Teachers‖ to retain when layoffs are necessary. Even in the absence of student-growth models and multiple-measure evaluation systems—which the state and districts will be developing—districts should be able to leverage their existing teacher-evaluation data to make these determinations.



In the second case, districts could skip some or all teachers in seniority-based layoffs, if not doing so would violate student rights to equal educational opportunities. This is consistent with the preliminary injunction filed by the judge overseeing the recent case against the Los Angeles schools, which argued that teacher layoffs in three middle schools impaired educational equity (Reed v. State of California). Skipping some teachers in high-need schools—effective teachers, in particular—would ensure that the students who most need the best teachers are not forced to bear a disproportionate burden in times of layoffs.